


looking for a creation myth

by andchaos



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, Fix-It, Human Castiel (Supernatural), M/M, Post-Season/Series 08, Recreational Drug Use, canon timeline is nothing and i steal characters from all over the goddamn place, here's how agoraphobic housewife cas can still win, here's how endverse cas can still win
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:02:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 39,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27675106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchaos/pseuds/andchaos
Summary: After the angels fall, and the Gates to Hell are closed, all that's left is for Cas to cope with being human. Unfortunately that's much easier said than done.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 54





	1. riptide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one's for all spn's other, other wasted potential. happy thanksgiving and happy bi dean week  
> tw for weed, drinking, canon-typical violence and op being an obnoxious stoner

Cas wakes up on the side of the road. He crawls out of the dirt, looks up and sees a skyline full of his brethren falling from grace. Cas knows all about falling. From grace. From Heaven. And in love, too. Cas is a fucking expert on falling, no doubt.

First he sits on the side of the road and buries his face in his hands. Then, when he’s cried his fill, he gets up and walks until he comes upon the lights of the nearest town, about four miles down the road. From a payphone just outside of Albany, New York, Cas dials a familiar number with one quarter he found after a painstaking search of local convenience stores’ floors and all along the side of the road on the way here. The phone rings six times. Is this what it feels like to wait, to not just fly away wherever he wants to go? Cas is missing his wings more than he thought was possible.

“Hello?”

Cas’s favorite, most familiar voice in the whole world is in a goddamn bitch of a mood tonight. Well, it’s going around.

“Dean,” he rasps. “I need your help.”

“I’m kinda busy here, Cas.”

What’s that running in an undercurrent? Some kind of wobbling. Cas thought his chest was already aching the worst it knew how, but now Dean has to go and get weepy.

“Are you crying?” he asks, softer.

“What? No,” says Dean. He pauses. “Look Cas, Sammy’s hurt. Real hurt.”

“I just got thrown off the proverbial cloud and landed in the mud with my wings ripped out and my grace _stolen from me_ ,” Cas informs him. “So you’ll excuse my impatience when I tell Sam to, how do you say it? Stow his crap long enough for you two to come pick me up.”

Dean’s silent for a minute. For so long that Cas barks out his name again.

“Where are you?” Dean asks finally.

“Outside of a Gas N Sip near Albany,” Cas says, breathing a sigh of relief. “Will you hurry?”

“Alright, just share your location with me,” Dean says. He makes a frustrated sound. “I can’t leave until the morning. Will you be OK up there for two days alone?”

Cas frowns. Already, his stomach is beginning to rumble. The night is chilly, staining his cheeks pink, and the hand holding the payphone is going numb in the pinky. Cas looks down the dark, empty street and lets out a sigh. 

“How do you do it, Dean?” he asks quietly. “Handle all of this so easily...”

Dean doesn’t answer for another long minute.

“I’ll try to leave at sunrise,” he promises. “It’s a long drive, Cas, are you sure you can’t get any closer to me?”

“No.” Cas’s throat works as he tries to swallow, fails, tries again. “I’m human now, Dean.”

It’s the first time he’s said the words rather than just thinking them. His voice is scratchy, and his throat still aches even though he’s stopped talking. The dry night air is stinging his eyes.

“I’ll be there soon,” Dean says in his low, comforting voice.

And then he hangs up.

Soon doesn’t feel very soon to Cas. He sits on the curb outside the gas station for a very long time, his feet growing numb in these stupid dress shoes, his eyes heavy, but he doesn’t want to sleep exposed out here in the open. If he’s learned anything from the Winchesters, it’s the vital necessity of a lockable door. Cas wonders if he can maybe just stay here for two straight days, still as a marble statue until Dean comes to burst him from the clay. Maybe yesterday, he could have.

Around one in the morning, a truck pulls in to fill up his tank. Cas doesn’t realize the driver is watching him until he comes over and puts his hand on Cas’s shoulder and he startles, tensing up, ready for the worst.

The man merely holds out his clenched fist and says, “Take this, son. It ain’t much, but it’s all I’ve got on me after gas.”

Confused, Cas raises his hands and cups them beneath his outstretched one, and the man drops a handful of quarters into Cas’s palms. Cas gazes up and up at him. His scraggly white beard hides most of his lower half of his face, but Cas thinks the man is smiling.

“Thank you,” he croaks.

“Peace be with you,” the man returns with a nod.

The truck rumbles away down the otherwise dark and empty street. Cas gets up and goes inside to get a hot coffee to warm his hands with; there, the blowing heater makes him ache for the warmth of a bed, any bed. He’s so tired. Cas takes his coffee with a quiet thank you and sets off down the street toward the busier part of town until he comes across a laundromat.

He checks the prices posted up inside. His stomach is rumbling, but he doesn’t have enough for both clean clothes and food. He definitely doesn’t have enough for a motel.

Cas ditches his bloody suit in a laundromat washing machine and steals jeans and a soft, striped long sleeve from a nearby dryer. It’s so late that there’s nobody else around to see him do it, and Cas leaves before the owner can return from wherever it is they went. Cas buys two granola bars from a brightly lit CVS and steals some chapstick, clumsier than Dean would pocket it but the teenage checkout girl obviously doesn’t care. Watching her closely, Cas steals some gum too.

Then he finds an empty bench in a park, pulls his bloodied trenchcoat over himself, and goes to sleep.

The morning is cloudy and cooler, although not as bone-numbingly chilly as last night. He can’t feel his hands from a long night beneath his head, but at least the blood is still thrumming through them. The park is bustling with people. Cas sits up on the bench and rubs his eyes. Nobody looks twice at him, so he takes his time getting up and ducking out between all the teens smoking cigarettes before school and the well-dressed business people chatting and buying coffee before their days start too. He wishes he had toothpaste, but is glad he’s got breakfast, and the gum to chew afterward.

He needs to figure out something to do for money today. At least Dean’s on his way by now, should’ve left hours ago if he was able to leave with the rising sun.

Cas learns about begging from a very nice old man named Forrest. Apparently it works better if you have some sort of talent, like singing or drawing or playing a mime, but Cas doesn’t know how to do anything like that. He sits with Forrest in front of an Applebee’s with empty coffee cups, asking for change. Some people, like a small group of teenage girls and a nice churchgoing couple, stuff in dollar bills, but most ignore the two of them entirely.

Afterwards, Forrest teaches him how to dumpster dive.

“How’d you end up on the streets, anyway?” Forrest asks over beans and a loaf of bread they found unspoiled behind the grocery. “You seem mighty green.”

“I’m not on the streets,” Cas tells him, keeping his slop of beans from falling off of the bread slice. “My friend Dean is coming to get me.”

“And when’s this guardian angel coming to rescue you from this Hell?”

Cas looks at him for a long time before he starts laughing. It’s just a giggle at first: then Forrest is looking at him like he’s exploded into his true form when Cas starts laughing for real, doubled over, clutching his stomach. It’s really not that funny, he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him; his head is cotton, and he feels extremely unstable. What else is he supposed to do, anyway, except laugh?

“Dean is not a guardian angel,” Cas says, still smiling, taking another large bite of bread. “He’s just a very, very good man, and he’s my friend.”

“Mhm,” Forrest says, giving him side-eye.

He learns his lesson about being green the hard way, after Forrest shows him a better place in the park to sleep and then Cas makes the mistake of getting up in the middle of the night to pee.

There are three of them, that’s all he knows. They’re mean. One of them has a knife. They don’t care that Cas has approximately $3 to his name at the moment. It doesn’t matter to them that in twelve hours, he’ll be home free—or home bound. He does manage to avoid getting stabbed.

It’s a long, cold night under the trenchcoat. He wishes he could clean out the blood: From the jacket, from his hair. It’s matted behind his jaw and making his ears cold.

When he wakes up, he only realizes that he hoped Dean would be here by now because of how crushingly disappointing it is that he isn’t. He’s so failing at the knight in shining armor routine right now, if that’s what he was going for. Not that Cas expects that, but he just—Purgatory happened. He didn’t hallucinate that, he’d stopped being crazy by then.

Forrest _is_ here, awake and munching on peanuts. He beams at Cas when he sees that he’s up.

“Hiya, Cas,” he says. “I see your Dean still isn’t here to save you.”

“Yeah, I noticed. Thanks for that,” Cas grumbles. He sits up. “I need mouthwash, desperately.”

“Maybe your friend will have that too.”

Cas doesn’t like the way he says ‘friend.’ He is so sick of people saying that to him. _Get it together_ , he warns himself. He is not feeling very angelic today.

He wanders into town again to see if he can get a cheap peppermint latte to wash this taste out of his mouth; Forrest gave him a dollar after he saw what those guys did to Cas‘s face. He finds one that’s scalding hot and horribly bitter but does the trick, and he drinks it outside while he reads a newspaper someone left open on their seat. The metal of the table is cold on his bare wrists, but he feels better now that he’s surrounded by people on the crowded street.

Around two in the afternoon, the curbside darkens with the roar of an engine right before it cuts off. A door slams. Cas’s ears are tingling with how hard he’s both listening and pretending not to listen, pretending to read the newspaper instead. Maybe these human tics _will_ come more naturally than he feared—or dared to hope.

“Hey, Cas!”

Under the sunlight with his head tipped down, Dean falls entirely in shadow. Cas squints at him, but when Dean crouches down and sticks his face close, Cas can’t help relenting to a smile. It jabs at his gut when he sees that Dean isn’t: He’s frowning, reaching out for Cas’s jaw to tilt his face around.

“Jesus, man. What happened to you?”

“Someone was very interested in my money,” Cas says, feeling sour again. He twists out of Dean’s grasp. “I had three dollars on me.”

“Shit.” Dean stands and glowers into the middle distance—probably wondering how he can track those muggers down and kill them. Cas can’t read his mind anymore, but he’s done it enough times before to see the signs. “So the being human thing is true, huh?”

“Yes.” Cas crosses his arms. “All of us...all the angels. We’ve had our wings clipped. And my...” He swallows, looks away. “My grace is gone.”

“ _What_? Metatron did that to all of you?”

“I…I don’t know. I suspect the other angels’ graces would have fallen too, much like Anna’s did.”

“Then let’s just go get it back,” Dean says, spreading his hands. “We can look for the signs—”

“Mine didn’t fall,” Cas says, frowning up at him. “Metatron stole it.”

Dean looks stricken for a split second before he rearranges his features into deliberate calm. Yeah, Cas has seen those signs before too. Right now, he’d estimate that Dean is 80% hot air. “We’ll...steal what we can, then, I don’t know—Maybe some of the leftovers survived and turned into a sapling or something. We’ll grab that, and we’ll even kill the son of a bitch as a bonus to you.”

“No we won’t,” Cas says, shaking his head. Dean’s smile slides off his face like sickly-sweet syrup. “You’re not listening to me. There’s nothing to get back.”

“What, he used all of it?”

Cas raises his eyes to glare. “Yes, as a matter of fact, he did.”

“Oh.” Dean pauses. “I’m really sorry, Cas.”

He shrugs, looking at his feet. Cas doesn’t want his pity; he doesn’t want his apologies, either. Cas did this. He was stupid, he trusted the wrong people, and worst of all he didn’t trust _Dean_. Well, consider trusting him with his entire life and then some at the top of Cas’s new to-do list. The air thrums with their silence.

“Have you eaten?” Dean sighs finally. Cas shakes his head. Extending his arm, Dean says, “Come on, let’s get you some burgers and fries.”

Dean’s not the only kind man in the world, but it feels both the most shameful and the warmest when he’s the one doing good deeds. Kicking his feet under the table, stuffing his face with a juicy bacon cheeseburger and convincing Dean to buy him a toothbrush before they head back to Lebanon is the best and worst that Cas has felt since he fell. By God, being human is so _complicated_.

“Where’s Sam?” Cas asks when he’s got food in his stomach and, coincidentally, is feeling better and more in control than he has since he landed here. His headache’s even gone away. He wonders if modern medicine knows about the healing properties of cheeseburgers. “He didn’t come with you. Is he OK? Is he really that hurt?”

Dean ducks his head.

“Yeah...yeah. It’s bad,” he says. “He finished the trials, you know—closed the Gates of Hell.”

Cas sits up, alarmed.

“Dean, that was supposed to kill him.”

“I know. I...I don’t know what happened. I asked him to stop…” Dean shakes his head. “But he finished the ritual. Crowley’s cured. We both thought that he’d drop dead, but he didn’t.”

“So where is he?”

“Um...He’s in the hospital,” Dean says, his voice breaking down the middle, all brittle at the edges and shaky with grief. He sucks in a sharp breath, and like magic, Cas watches him recompose before his eyes. “In a coma. It’s fine, I’m fine. He’s gonna be—”

“Sam will wake up,” Cas says, reaching across the table to touch his wrist. “He didn’t die in that church. We may not know the reason for it, but that’s a _good_ sign.”

“Yeah.” Dean sniffs, wipes his eyes. “Whew! Shit. I didn’t mean to get all weepy in a burger joint.”

“That’s OK. You have a very good reason.”

They finish eating and find a store with both toothpaste and some Neosporin, because that’s the only thing Dean doesn’t have in his first aid kit. Cas sits on the hood of the car while Dean stands beside him with his toolkit spread out for easy access. 

“Must you?” Cas asks, trying to duck away from the cotton ball that’s nearly touching his eye.

Dean gapes at him. “Yes, I must!”

“Ugh.”

“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Dean snaps, holding his shoulder to keep him still while he finishes cleaning up his bruise. “This is serious.”

“How is this serious?” he asks. “This is literally the most mundane reason that I have ever needed medical care, that’s a fucking _joke_ , Dean.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dean says, rearing back to stare at him. “You are all fired up today.”

“I’m sorry,” he says shortly.

He means it, but still. For a minute, Dean doesn’t move, and Cas glares at the pavement.

“You’re human now,” Dean says eventually, bending to get back to his task. He stretches a butterfly bandage over Cas’s neck, knuckles bumping the underside of his chin. “You need to take better care of yourself.”

If he wasn’t just admonished for acting like a dick, he would absolutely be rolling his eyes right now.

“I’ll try,” he forces himself to say. Dean looks a little happier after that, which is ostensibly the whole reason he said it in the first place. It doesn’t make him feel any better.

Dean wipes away the blood on his neck and a little from his hairline, from the corner of his mouth where he can feel the edge is cracked from the cold. Sighing, he crushes the rag in his fist.

“Come on,” Dean says, knocking a knuckle against Cas’s cheek. “You’re good to go. We’ll stop for whiskey on the way home.”

“I thought you already disinfected my wounds,” he says, jumping off the car.

“I didn’t say it was for cleaning anything.”

It’s nearly a day’s drive back to Kansas. Cas understands the need to stop for the night in the middle, but he wishes Dean believed in stopping _earlier_ , so they could enjoy things like dinner and downtime with a TV. He’s been alone with his own thoughts for two days now.

It’s going to take three days total to get home. They only drove for eight hours tonight and will probably split up the second leg of the journey, too, if Cas can convince Dean to pull off for any interesting tourist traps. He’s in a rush to get to Kansas, but there are a few attractions he’s been trying to see for awhile.

Cas spends the morning watching cartoons on low volume, then figures he should start doing yoga after he sees a commercial for women’s stretchy pants. Humans do that kind of thing, right? It’s good for them, helps center their spirits? Cas could use that right about now. He sneaks Dean’s phone off the nightstand and goes outside to the front lawn of the motel with a beginner’s video pulled up on Youtube..

Dean finds him acting like a tree forty minutes later. He leans his hip against the trunk of a big, shady willow, dressed but clearly still muddy from sleep. His hair’s a mess. Cas already knew this, but he can still appreciate how Dean looks really good first thing in the morning.

“What are you doing?”

“Yoga.”

“On the front lawn?”

Cas shrugs. It makes him sway on his one planted foot.

“There wasn’t that much room inside.”

“Fair enough.” Dean jerks his head. “Are you eating breakfast?”

Cas blinks.

“Yes,” he says. “I suppose I am.”

He follows Dean back into the room, finds a spread of bagels that he must have had delivered because Cas never heard the car. Cas tries an everything bagel with some flavored cream cheese that comes in the bag. Dean makes faces at him, but it’s honestly not that bad.

They check out around eleven and set off immediately, so they actually get in a decent amount of miles today; Cas convinces him to pull over in the early evening to find a dinner theater for them to see, because now that he thinks about it that’s on Cas’s bucket list too. Maybe he’ll write one down for real and convince Dean to help him check them off, one by one. He’s sure he’ll be interested in teaching Cas to be human.

Dean finds them a murder mystery show. The food is underwhelming, the performance is very good. Cas buys a hat at the counter and puts it on.

“Alright, that’s the last time I’m buying you anything besides real clothes for your new wardrobe,” Dean tells him. He pulls Cas to a stop by the shoulder, looking him over. “What are you wearing?”

“I stole it from a laundromat,” he admits.

Dean sighs. Cas makes a move for the car, but Dean pulls on him until their faces are close and he’s hit with the full force of Dean’s disappointed glare.

“Why didn’t you call me?” he demands. “If you were having a rough go of it. I could have given you my credit card number or something.”

Cas blinks at him.

“I guess...I didn’t think of that,” he says, frowning. Now that Dean says it, it does seem like the obvious answer. “I’m not used to needing help."

“Well I’m sorry, but those days are over.” Dean shakes his head. “From now on, I’m the first person you call when things go sideways. OK? I should be the first number on your speed dial.”

“Of course, Dean,” he promises gravely. “Will you show me how to set that up?”

This makes Dean crack a smile, and he shakes his head but Cas is learning—he doesn’t think it’s a _no_ , regardless. Dean pulls him along outside to the car.

The motel isn’t far. Dean accidentally books them a double bed at the counter, but he looks at Cas and relents to taking the couch immediately. Privileges of sleeping outside in the park for two days, he supposes. Cas can’t figure out how to say that he wouldn’t mind sharing the bed, so he doesn’t bring it up.

They make it back to the bunker in the early afternoon the next day. Dean gives Cas a room down the hall and then points him in the direction of the showers. He’ll have to borrow...everything. Man, being a human is expensive.

Dean’s shampoo smells nice, his soap smells nicer. Mostly Cas is just glad that he’s clean at all and that he now has access to a toothbrush, but it’s the first perk he’s had since landing wingless on Earth. When he gets back to his bedroom—it’s very bare and depressing, and what Cas imagines jail is like based on what he’s seen on Sam’s cop shows—finds a plain white t-shirt and grey sweatpants folded neatly on the bed.

He can hear Dean in the kitchen for much of the evening, banging things around and singing. He wonders if it’s a subtle expression of expectation that Cas will come out and join him, but he doesn’t do that: He sits in his room staring at the wall for a long time. After awhile, he leaves in search of a pad of paper and a pen.

He passes the kitchen on his way to the study.

“Hey! There you are,” Dean calls out. Cas slowly backtracks and comes into the room. “I’m making some dinner, are you hungry?”

“Yes,” Cas says, because he seems to always be hungry now. He hopes that goes away eventually, or at least tempers. “I was actually looking for something to write with…”

“I left a notepad on one of the tables in the library,” Dean says, nodding at the door.

After some deliberation about staying in the library, Cas returns to the kitchen with paper and pen and posts up in the corner. For ten or so minutes it’s silent except for the scratch of Cas’s writing, water bubbling and whatever song Dean’s humming under his breath. Then Dean finishes chopping some carrots, wipes his hands on his apron and comes over to the table where Cas is crouched over.

“Whatcha doing over here, looking all serious?”

“I’m making a to-do list,” Cas says, honestly, but he still doesn’t move to let Dean see. So far he’s got four items, the top two of which are _buy underwear_ and _buy toiletries_.

“What’s that?” Dean asks, nudging his arm aside to point at something a little bit down the page.

“Oh.” Cas shifts his elbow. “That’s my bucket list.”

Dean’s brow furrows as he tilts his head to read it.

“‘Try dragon fruit,’” he reads. “‘Go bungee jumping. Get a tattoo?’ Are you serious, man?”

“Yes,” Cas frowns, pulling the page closer again so Dean can’t read any more. “I should probably get my anti-possession tattoo. And I want to ward myself against the angels, if they think to come looking for me again.”

“Do you think they’re gonna hunt you down?”

Cas shrugs. “It’s possible. I was tricked, but I still had a hand in making them fall. Now that Naomi’s dead, I’m not sure if anyone knows that.” 

“Hm.”

Dean doesn’t offer up any helpful suggestions, and after a minute he goes back to making his soup or whatever it is he’s doing over there. It turns out to be some kind of vegetable medley side dish for the chicken Dean cooks them for dinner. By the time he pushes his plate back, Cas finally feels full for the first time since he woke up on the side of the road.

“I was thinking we could go into town tomorrow and check some of those things off your to-do list,” Dean says. “My friend Charlie hooked us up. We have a couple fake credit cards with no limit. I’m sure we can do some serious damage.”

“I thought Charlie never wanted to see you again,” Cas says curiously.

“She did. Then she changed her mind,” Dean says with a shrug. “She got the hunting bug, couldn’t help doing some local research. She started calling me, and texting me—nosing into things...so I showed her a few tricks to help her on her way. She’s better off safe than sorry.”

“Hm,” says Cas.

They hit Walmart so Cas can fill up on underthings and bathroom necessities, and he picks up a few candles and journals for his room. Dean stops asking what the hell he’s doing sometime around the big poster of the lights of New Delhi that Cas throws in the cart. They’re supposed to be inconspicuous with their illegal funds, meaning they’re not supposed to spend too much at once, but Dean seems unwilling to blame him for a couple of impulse buys when he’s trying to build a life from the ground up.

Cas spends twenty-five minutes standing in the candle aisle, carefully picking out every single scent he can stomach. Dean tries to insist that they don’t really need a _third_ jasmine-scented one but Cas’s stubborn insistence on the difference between the white jasmine, honeysuckle jasmine and smoked jasmine leaves Dean’s dissuasion attempts in the dust. Cas gets ten new candles and a lighter that has an intricate drawing of a skull growing pastel flowers painted on the side.

For a week, Cas stays in the bunker. He helps Dean cook, reads quietly while Dean watches TV after dinner, shares a drink with him nearly every night. Dean doesn’t catch a case the whole time, but it’s clear being stuck inside is making him antsy because he keeps making up errands to run during the day. Cas never comes with him on those. He starts leaving his to-do list on the kitchen table so Dean can run with it and pick him up the stuff he needs—if he’s so inclined. Cas would never ask him to do it, but it turns out that he doesn’t have to.

The Saturday after Cas moves in, Dean receives a phone call over breakfast. He picks up right at the table and has a five minute conversation about what sounds to Cas like the logistics of organizing a get together—something to do with _LARPing_ , whatever that is. Cas watches him curiously when he hangs up.

“What was all that about?” Cas asks.

Dean picks his fork back up and arches an eyebrow across the table.

“How would you feel about taking a trip to Wichita?”

“What’s in Wichita?”

About three hours outside of Lebanon, there’s a first floor apartment with a pride flag affixed to the front door and an extremely excitable redhead bursting to throw her arms around Dean’s neck. Cas stands uncomfortably to the side while she gestures Dean inside, feeling very much the outsider—Or at least, he does until Dean steps past with a hand to her shoulder, and Charlie takes one look at Cas and throws herself into his arms, too. Cas stumbles back a step, not expecting this; he awkwardly pats her between the shoulder blades.

“You must be Cas!” Charlie says excitedly. “It’s so great to meet you.”

“Um...You too,” Cas says, stepping out of her arms in what he hopes is a gentle letdown. “Dean has said some very kind things about you.”

“Aw, stop! You big softie,” Charlie says, beaming. “Come in, come in.”

Her apartment is small but stacked to the ceiling with a mix of ugly antiques and pop culture merchandise. Cas shuffles close to Dean while Charlie finds them some beer and then gets right down to brass tacks with Dean about their LARP thing. They try to explain it to Cas, but it seems like a lot of running around in the woods dressed in costumes, and he doesn’t understand the point. They’re planning some kind of festival for the spring.

They order pizza for lunch, and after a lengthy argument between Dean and Charlie about whether pineapple or anchovies taste better as topping, they get one of each and make Cas the tie breaker. He thinks that both of them have incredibly out-of-whack taste buds and picks off the anchovies to eat it plain.

Charlie set up the pull-out couch for the two of them, but they don’t get a chance to use it. Around six, when they’re trying to teach Cas how to play Call of Duty: WWII, Dean’s phone starts ringing against his hip. Charlie coaxes Cas into another round while Dean takes it in the other room.

“Hey guys,” he says, coming back into the living room a few minutes later. “That was Garth, he’s got a case that’s only about an hour from here. I’m gonna swing by and check it out, if—if that’s OK with you, Charlie.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go,” she insists.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh, duh. It’s monster-hunting stuff, saving people’s lives,” Charlie says, and Cas can see it in her smile just how much she admires Dean. “That’s kind of what you do.”

“Great,” Dean says. “I’ll be back tonight.”

“Do you need me to come with you?” Cas asks.

“No, no.” He shakes his head. “Stay here, it shouldn’t be too much trouble. Sounds like a basic ghost possession case to me.”

“OK,” Cas concedes, though he’s frowning. “Call me if there’s any trouble.”

“I will,” Dean says, winking at him. Then he grabs his keys and dips out the door.

Cas loses spectacularly to Charlie in COD, but mostly because he loses interest as soon as he starts falling behind. He sighs when the round is over and puts down his controller.

“We don’t...have to keep playing video games,” Charlie says. “We could do something else.”

“I would like that, yes,” Cas says. The air congeals between them, and Cas frowns, shifting to face her. “I’m sorry, it’s not that I don’t enjoy your company. You are actually…very nice. I’m just very new to the whole ‘being human’ thing.”

“Oh yeah, Dean mentioned something about that,” Charlie says. She makes a face. “Sorry about all that falling from grace stuff.”

Cas shrugs one shoulder.

“It was worth it,” he says honestly.

“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier to deal with,” Charlie says. She claps Cas on the arm, and her touch lingers. “Let’s do something else. Do you like peppermint vodka?”

“Yes. It’s very festive.” Cas knows this because of a very boring Christmas movie he watched at three in the morning last week; there’s never anything good on past midnight. He gets to his feet. “But uh, may I use your bathroom first?”

She points him in the right direction. He finishes quickly only to find that Charlie’s completely out of hand soap. With a sigh, he starts pulling open drawers—Nada. He ventures a few feet down the hall to check in the cabinet.

When Cas pulls open the middle drawer there, he blinks. Pauses. Reaches into the drawer and pulls out a little ziploc bag.

“Charlie?” he calls.

She pokes her head around the corner to peer down the hall. Cas holds up the bag.

“What’s this?”

“Oh! What are you doing with my weed, man?” Charlie asks, coming down the hall to take it from him. She flips the bag over. “Did you wanna smoke this?”

“I...don’t know,” Cas says honestly. “I’ve never tried it.”

“That’s right. There’s probably no point trying to get high when you’re an angel.”

“No, probably not. I imagine it would take quite a lot of marijuana,” Cas muses. “I was just, um, looking for the extra soap.”

He adds this in case she thinks he was snooping. Dean once told him it’s not right to steal drugs from a friend’s party. At the time, they were neither at a party nor talking about drugs, so the metaphor went over Cas’s head, but he thinks that it probably applies quite literally in this case.

“That would be right here.”

Charlie’s putting nachos in the oven when Cas returns to the living room and its connected kitchenette. She flips the TV to some show that, from what Cas can easily surmise, features a beautiful woman in tight clothing who fights demons in the South.

When Charlie gets up to get the nachos, Cas’s attention goes with her, then snags on the little bag sitting on the corner of the counter. Charlie sets the sizzling chips down on the coffee table just as Cas gets up. She starts to ask a question, then decides against it; Cas drifts to the counter and touches her weed, thinking. Finally he thinks, _fuck it_ , and whirls around.

“Can we smoke this together?” he asks.

The ziploc dangles from his fingers. Charlie pushes herself up from her slouch.

“Yeah,” she says automatically. Then her brows pull together. “I—I mean...No offense, but are you sure you want to?”

“Why wouldn’t I want to?”

“I don’t know, because you’ve never tried it before?” Charlie says.

Cas clears his throat. “I’m sure.”

Charlie has a pristinely clean, orange and blue bowl with little stars drawn all over it. Despite Charlie’s repeated warnings that Cas be very careful and take his first hit slow, he still ends up inhaling too sharply. He’s pretty sure he’s going to cough up a lung onto Charlie’s living room floor, but he doesn’t; and when he comes to, Charlie is laughing.

“Did I do that wrong?” Cas asks, eyes watering, throat burning, his chest still tight.

“No, you nailed it,” Charlie assures him. “You’re going to be really, really high.”

“Oh, joy,” he says, narrowing his eyes at her.

But Cas’s bubbling upset is tempered as soon as the high starts rising within him, not even a minute later. Charlie grins when he raises his head and breaks out in a smile, and she gives a little cheer.

“I’ve never popped somebody’s weed cherry before,” Charlie says. “I especially didn’t think I would get a chance to devirginize an _angel_.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, you know what I mean,” Charlie says, waving her hand.

“No, I mean, I’m still a virgin.”

Charlie looks at him for so long that he thinks she’s going to judge him, but finally she just laughs and nudges him with her elbow.

“One thing at a time,” she suggests. “Don’t want Dean coming back and finding out I’ve turned out his best guy friend over the course of one afternoon.”

Charlie can handle a lot more weed than Cas, so he doesn’t bother trying to keep up. He’s seen what happens when humans overdue alcohol and has no interest in finding out what the marijuana equivalent is of a blackout and brutal hangover.

The nachos are delicious; together they swiftly eat half the pile. Charlie’s laughing uproariously at something Cas observes from the show that they’re half-paying attention to, something about how he can’t believe she’s enjoying demonic media when her real life is just as supernatural and completely horrifying. Charlie just shrugs.

“But they don’t make women like that in Wichita,” she says.

Cas hums and nods. Charlie looks at him.

“What?” she says. “None of these hot ladies are your type?”

“Are they yours?” Cas retorts, annoyance prickling along the back of his neck at her line of questioning, though for no reason he can discern.

“As a matter of fact, they are,” Charlie says. “What’s there to hate about a bunch of badass women kicking the snot out of mean, ugly revenants?”

Cas arches an eyebrow. Charlie looks at him for a long while before she nods.

“Oh, I see,” she says, pressing her lips together. “It’s the, uh, _women_ thing, isn’t it?”

Cas says nothing. His face is impassive, turned to the TV.

“It’s OK. You don’t have to explain anything to me,” Charlie says more seriously. She reaches out and finds a nacho that’s absolutely heaped with melted cheese, then resettles herself in the couch more comfortable.

Finally, awkwardly, Cas says, “It’s not a men thing.” He’s staring straight ahead at the screen and pretty sure his cheeks are burning.

“Let me guess. It’s a one-man-in-particular thing?” Charlie says. Cas barely turns his head enough to meet her gaze and he nods, sharply. “That is one seriously tough break, man.”

Cas shrugs. He opens his mouth to tell her it’s OK, to drop the subject and go back to the show, but something has him turning toward her before he can stop it and folding one of his legs beneath himself on the couch.

“It’s just—I went into this with my eyes closed,” Cas says, shaking his head. Charlie frowns, shifting too to give him her full attention. “I thought I was doing this for the right reasons, I—I _told_ myself that’s that what I was doing.”

“Closing up Heaven, you mean?”

“Yes.” He frowns at his hands in his lap. “But now it’s all so complicated.”

“I thought you were doing it to set Heaven straight,” Charlie puzzles out, frowning. “Isn’t that what the whole Purgatory thing was about? I mean that’s why you were going after Dick Roman in the first place.”

“Yes,” he sighs. “I thought I was doing penance for that by staying in Purgatory, but it just made Dean more angry. And then now...I tried to lock the angels in Heaven, to set things _right_. But I ended up closing the Gates forever. Now everybody’s fallen…”

“So the angels are a bunch of humans now?”

Cas shakes his head. “Yes. Especially me.”

Charlie reaches out to touch his arm.

“At least you have Dean,” she says, and Cas shrugs, looking away. Softer, she adds, “And you have me.”

Raising his eyes to her face, he says, “I...do? I mean, we’re...friends?”

“Well _duh_ ,” she says, rolling her eyes. She punches him in the arm. “I just let you smoke my weed, dude, of course we’re friends.”

He likes the sound of that, very much.

“Friends,” Cas repeats, and smiles to himself.

They finish the nachos, and Charlie smokes the rest of the bowl and cleans that up along with their food. Cas gets very cozy in the corner of her couch, and when she comes back, they put on another episode of her show while paying extra close attention to the pre-episode recap. Most of it still goes over Cas’s head.

During a commercial, Charlie mutes the TV and turns toward him.

“Hey Cas,” she begins. “Can I ask you something? You totally don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to.”

“Of course.” He likes Charlie very much, he’s decided. She seems genuine and kind. “What is it?”

“Before, when I said that you still had Dean and me,” she says. “For a second you looked...like something was going on there. _Is_ there something going on there?”

Cas sighs, looking down at his hands twisting together on his lap as he tries to find the words.

“I did all of this to save him,” Cas tells her patient expression. “It terrifies me how much I’ve done with that goal in mind, and what else I might be capable of if he continued to be put at risk or threatened.”

Charlie bumps his shoulder. “At least he must appreciate the gesture.”

“Maybe,” Cas says, though his brows are drawn and it doesn’t feel like he can do anything right by Dean these days; every move he makes is wrong. Or just not important enough to warrant significant attention in Dean’s already crowded headspace. He’s not sure which is worse.

“I’m glad we’re friends now, Charlie,” he tells her seriously.

At this moment, the doorknob jiggles with Charlie’s borrowed key. They both look up, and Charlie falls silent instead of saying whatever it was she opened her mouth to say.

“Heya, you two,” Dean greets, shrugging into the apartment. He sets two grocery bags on the counter. “I bought meat pies for dinner. I hope you’re hungry.”

“Starved,” Cas and Charlie say at the same time, and she smiles at him.

Cas inquires about the case once their places have been set, and Dean tells them he met up with a couple of hunters who already had it covered and they all went in together for the final battle. They kicked ass, but other than that Dean missed most of the build-up and research.

“I’m sure that was a terrible sacrifice for you,” Cas says wryly, and Dean laughs way harder than everybody else, like he always does when Cas successfully makes a good joke. Cas perks up, pleased.

All three of them crash on the pullout during a _Charlie’s Angels_ marathon, although when Cas wakes up Charlie’s gone and it’s just him and Dean on opposite sides of the mattress. He shifts off of it, trying his hardest not to jostle the cheap bed and wake up Dean.

Charlie didn’t set her coffee maker yesterday, must have forgotten in the haze of having company, so Cas takes it upon himself to make them all caffeine and eggs. He feels a little better this morning than he has all week, a little clearer-headed and more energized. He feels like he’s got clear eyes, although he didn’t notice before they were misguided.

The feeling stretches on all weekend as Charlie takes them bar hopping the next night, then on Saturday when Dean tells Charlie all about Sam as they’re getting wasted on wine coolers and poor man’s margaritas. They stay in Sunday morning playing Scrabble and sipping fancy lattes from the expensive place around the corner.

Cas finds himself very sorry to say goodbye to Charlie. She hugs him tight and promises to see them both soon, and then all too quickly their long weekend with her is over. Cas and Dean start the three hour drive toward home.

In truth, Cas wishes he had a better understanding of what Dean gets up to when he goes out. He leaves all too frequently and comes back smelling like beer or something stronger; sometimes he’s boasting a few extra hundred dollars in his pocket, but sometimes he just has strange bruises on his neck. Cas tries not to stare at those; they’re engrossing but at the same time make his stomach turn, because Dean’s showed him a lot of TV including porn this one time, and Cas knows what a hickey looks like now.

Three weeks after Cas becomes human, Dean buys him a cell phone. Two days after that, he walks into the kitchen and nearly runs headlong into Dean, who’s making them grilled cheeses.

“Woah, hey there, Cas,” Dean says, touching either shoulder to steady him. “Look alive, buddy. Are you playing Candy Crush _again_?”

“Hm? No,” Cas says. “I’m texting Charlie.”

“Charlie—My Charlie?”

“No. _Our_ Charlie,” Cas corrects, glancing at him. “She’s coming over tonight to watch Game of Thrones.” His eyes drift over to the stove, and he puts his phone safe and non-distracting in his pocket. “Is lunch ready yet?”

“Yep, almost. Can you grab us some glasses?”

They have a quiet, amicable lunch. Dean invites himself to TV night with Charlie. As they’re clearing away the table, still engrossed in a low conversation about mermaids and sirens, Dean’s phone lights up and starts buzzing.

Unknown number. They look at each other, then shrug. Dean answers the call on speaker.

“Hello?”

“Squirrel,” rasps a low, familiar voice that makes Cas’s stomach drop straight down into his shoes. “Long time, no see. Fancy meeting up for a chat?”

According to Dean, the appropriate things for Cas to bring on a simple hunt are four guns (hidden in various places on his body), two retractable knives, an angel blade up his sleeve and Chrysler Building-sized amount of celestial firepower. From what Cas is surmising as he watches Dean get ready from the doorway, the appropriate things for Dean to bring to a meeting with the disgraced ex-King of Hell is about two guns, an angel blade and a skyscraper short of that double-standard.

“I’m going alone.”

“No.”

“Cas, I hate to break this to you, but you’re not an angel anymore. You’re not strong enough.”

“I said no.”

Dean agreed to meet Crowley at a café in town, insisting that a) he can handle himself and b) they turned Crowley human in order to close the Gates of Hell, so he’s not much of a danger to them regardless. Cas is still deeply shaken by the idea of letting him go in alone; Crowley may not be juiced up, but he’s still a nasty son of a bitch, and Cas doesn’t trust him. Call it an ex-partner’s intuition.

“Would you please think about yourself for once?” Dean snaps. “If things go wrong…”

He shakes his head, mumbling a curse.

“Then it will be a good thing that I’m there to have your back,” Cas snarls.

Dean throws his hands in the air. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“No,” he says, and turns up his nose.

“Fine,” he says, flicking his eyes over Cas. “Go put on a jacket. It’s November, for crying out loud.”

Cas doesn’t have many of those. It’s too warm for a winter coat, and the only other jacket he owns is a sweatshirt with weird stick figures on it, which Dean informed him were created by some artist called Keith Haring. Cas still hasn’t gotten around to becoming more familiar with his work, but he shrugs that on and meets Dean in the study.

“Let’s go,” he says by way of announcing his presence.

The café isn’t far from the bunker. They roll up twenty minutes later and, aside from a minor incident with Cas and the crosswalk and almost running into oncoming traffic, they make it to the shop unscathed. Dean gets a plain black coffee, Cas tries some cherry thing that Dean thinks tastes like cough syrup. Cas has never had that, but he definitely agrees that the coffee is bad.

The bell rings and Crowley appears at the threshold of the shop. Cas looks down but he spots them immediately.

“Hello boys,” he says.

Dean glares. Cas looks him up and down and stiffly says, “I like your...skirt.”

“It’s a kilt. Thank you,” Crowley says, sliding into the other side of the booth. 

He sounds like Crowley and looks like Crowley—mostly—but he sure as shit doesn’t act like him. Dean’s on edge and pointing a gun underneath the table, but Cas steeples his fingers together and leans across the cheap formica.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, calmly he thinks; but Crowley flicks his gaze over Cas as though he’s a bug that’s crawled its way into their conversation.

“Down, boy,” he says mildly. Dean’s gun clicks, and Crowley puts up his hands. “No need to test out your trigger finger there, Dean. I come in peace.”

“Yeah, because that sounds just like you.”

“As a matter of fact, ever since tall, dark and not-so-handsome put me on a special diet of his _blood_ , it does, in fact, sound like me,” Crowley’s lip curls. “Look around you, Dean. Demons can’t survive on Earth anymore. We’re being picked off and given a one-way ticket back downstairs one by one.”

“You’re here because you’re human,” Cas realizes.

Crowley’s attention jumps to him.

“Exactly,” he says. His brows come together, eyes narrowing. “There’s something off about you, cherub.”

“I was a _seraph_ ,” Cas snarls, and Dean’s hand is there on his shoulder lightning-fast.

“Woah, woah! Easy—”

“Was?” Crowley says. “Ah. I see you’ve come down with the same sad disease as I: Humanity.”

Cas scowls at the table. “Yes.”

“Ain’t life a bitch?”

“Yes,” Cas agrees more fervently, glancing up.

Looking between them both, Dean says, “Alright, alright, that’s enough. Cut to the chase, Crowley. What do you want?” and Crowley smirks.

“I,” he announces, “want to join your operation.”

Dean and Cas both freeze. They look at each other with Dean’s eyebrows climbing higher and higher toward his hairline. Crowley spreads his hands and beams at them as though this is the most simple request in the world.

“ _What_?” says Dean.

Cas leans in, tipping his head and giving Crowley a look that he hopes properly conveys _Are you fucking crazy?_ This is clearly not the reaction he was hoping for; Crowley’s smile slides off his face like honey.

“I want to be one of the good guys,” he elaborates.

“We don’t need you,” says Cas.

“Hey now, I’m trying to help!”

“We don’t want your help.”

“Alright, alright, alright.” Dean’s hand lands on his shoulder and rubs circles into Cas’s sleeve. Unsurprisingly, the touch instantly calms him down; Dean has his pull over him, oh yes, even now. Even when he’s not the most important thing in the room, he still is. He always is. “What do you really want, Crowley?”

“Excuse me?”

“This goodie two-shoes, join the light side crap isn’t working on us,” Dean says. “OK? So give it up and tell us what we’re really doing here. Stop wasting our time!”

“I’m not…” Crowley cusses under his breath, shaking his head. “I’m not lying! You and Moose cured me, in case you forgot. I’m a good guy now!”

Dean gestures him across the table. Crowley and Cas both lean in. When he’s sure he has their attention, Dean demands, right up in Crowley’s face, “Do I look like I was born yesterday to you?”

“Well compared to everyone else at this table, you pretty much _were_ , darling.”

“He’s right, Dean,” Cas says. To Crowley, he adds, “Although I was created at the beginning of Time itself. You’re still basically a teenager to me.”

“Ah, and what are your high school years without a healthy smattering of teenage rebellion?” Crowley asks. “Come on, Dean. Castiel. I’ve changed! I want to reconnect with my parents now that I’m grown up and living on my own.”

“OK first of all, stop calling yourself a teenager, alright? I am not your dad,” Dean says. “And second of all, you opened Purgatory, man! You tortured Kevin! I mean, up until three weeks ago, you were literally running Hell. We’re not just gonna let you hop right on over to Team Free Will because you drank a little blood. I mean, who hasn’t?”

“I...didn’t realize we were still calling ourselves that,” Cas says.

“I like it. Shut up.”

Cas refastens his expression back into a glare across the table. Crowley sighs.

“Look, boys. I’m trying...to do better.” He swallows. “Just give me a chance. Please, just give me a chance to do better.”

Dean looks at Crowley; then he looks at Cas. Cas tilts his head at Dean, his brow furrowed to indicate that he doesn’t think this is a good idea. Dean looks him for a long time before he sighs.

“I’m sorry, Crowley. I actually— _really_ am,” Dean says. “But you’ve done too much shit up until now.”

“But I’ve changed,” he says, in a voice that tugs on Cas’s heartstrings. Shit, in some ways he doesn’t blame Crowley: The guy was a demon, they were forged in literal fire. He knows he’s just biased because that could have—would’ve—been Dean if Cas didn’t do what he did, but that knowledge doesn’t make the urge any less compelling.

“We can’t trust you,” Dean says.

Shaking his head, Dean sighs. He finishes his coffee and slides out of the booth.

“Cas—” Crowley starts.

“Don’t,” Cas snaps. “After what you’ve done?”

“What about what you’ve done, angel?” Crowley asks as he stands, too. “Sorry. _Ex_ -angel. Why should you get a second chance when I don’t?”

Cas sets his hands on the table and ducks down, shoving his face into Crowley’s.

“Because I’ve proven myself a friend to him,” he growls.

Crowley scoffs. “Is that what you crazy kids are calling it these days?”

Cas’s mouth pulls up in a sneer, but before he can reach out and slam Crowley’s head into the table, Dean pulls him back. His hand splays on Cas’s chest, right over his pounding heart, and he shoves Cas back.

“Let him go. Just leave it,” Dean murmurs in his ear, jostling him toward the door. Other diners are starting to stare.

Cas looks at him. Then he shakes off his hands and stalks outside to the car. In the parking lot, Dean asks him what Crowley said, but Cas just slams the passenger door shut in reply.

Dean doesn’t try to talk to him on the ride home, and Cas shuts himself up in his room when they get back to the bunker. He hears Dean walk by his door a few times, but it takes him nearly three hours to actually knock. Cas isn’t feeling much better, but he’s calmed enough to be sorry that he made a scene. His hands aren’t shaking anymore either.

“Cas?” Dean calls, his voice deliberately gentled in a way that makes Cas’s chest squeeze tight. 

He sits up and sighs, shutting his book.

“Come in.”

Dean’s swinging a beer from one hand and dressed down in sweatpants now, and Cas instinctively scoots over on the bed so Dean has room to sit down next to him.

“Hey,” Dean says. “Can I?”

He gestures to the empty spot on the bed, and Cas nods. They’re so close on the narrow bed that their knees, practically their whole thighs are touching and Cas looks down at the space between them quietly for a minute before glancing up at his face, but Dean’s still looking down at his hands, playing with his bottle cap.

“Are you OK?” Dean asks finally, looking up to meet his gaze.

Cas tips his head. “I’m fine, Dean. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know, something just seems...off about you lately.”

“I believe it’s called an adjustment period.”

“Well yeah, sure. But it seems deeper than that. I don’t know,” Dean says, shaking his head. “You don’t seem very angelic lately, that’s all.”

“That makes sense, doesn’t it?” Cas says before he can stop himself. “Considering that I’m not one anymore.”

“Hey...” Dean’s eyebrows pull together, and he reaches out as though for Cas’s knee; his hand stops in the air between them and falls to the mattress, where his fingers clench loosely in the sheets. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Well it’s true,” Cas says, ignoring the impulse to soothe Dean’s concern. He feels feverish, like he used to when he was insane and things got tense; he feels like a rabid dog with no control over his bark. If he could fly himself to the living room and lock all the doors, he would.

“OK, what is up with you?” Dean demands. “I know you’ve been having a hard go of it lately, but newsflash, Cas: Everything sucks! Always has, probably always will. But it’s more than that. You ain’t acting like yourself.”

“Excuse me for leaving my harp on cloud nine, Dean,” Cas spits. “I must have left it there before somebody ripped out my grace and threw me down to Earth. I’m still getting used to having to use the bathroom five times a day.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Cas. Welcome to being normal!” Dean throws his hands in the air. “Maybe you should go get your prostate checked if you’re peeing too much.”

“ _What_?”

“I don’t know,” Dean says, annoyed. He scowls into the corner of Cas’s room, and Cas frowns in the other direction.

Before either of them break, or storm out, Cas’s phone rings. He glances down: There’s an emoji of an orange cat above a picture of Charlie with two thumbs up and a Castiel Funko POP doll on her shoulder. Fucking Chuck Shurley.

“She’s here,” he says grudgingly to Dean.

He picks up the phone as he’s walking out, leaving Dean alone in the middle of his room, sitting on his bed.

Charlie throws her arms around him when she comes in, and Cas chuckles in her ear, hugging her back. Everything instantly feels easier now that Charlie’s here.

“Where’s Dean?” she asks. Cas shrugs.

They post up in the kitchen to make movie food—Charlie is embarking on a campaign to educate him on both cinema and the proper snacks to go along with it, an endeavor that Dean eagerly insisted on joining. But when he comes into the kitchen while Charlie’s making popcorn, Dean sees them both and just freezes.

“Hey there, Charlie,” he says after an awkward beat, pulling her into a hug.

“Dean!” She squeezes him tight. “Are you still down for movie night?”

Dean glances at Cas over her shoulder. He looks back impassively.

“I’m going to have to pass,” Dean says. “Sorry. Got to do some reading on a vamp thing that Garth put me onto, so…”

Charlie frowns when he’s edging his way out of the room. She whirls around on Cas.

“What’s up with him?” she asks, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. Cas looks on in askance, not sure what to say.

Charlie decides to start out with the classics, by which she means a whole bunch of Disney and Pixar movies that she grew up on. Tonight, they start with Mulan, switch to the Sword in the Stone and graduate to all the Shreks; Cas has a little bit of trouble sorting out how much of each plot is meant to be fantasy and how much is supposed to be a metaphor, but then gets distracted by Charlie dancing in her seat to a song about having a bad reputation, and Cas breaks down laughing and forgets what he was thinking about.

Oh, yeah: Charlie brought a joint this time. She doesn’t have an ashtray but Cas repurposes the top of an old takeout container that Dean left in here ages ago. She and Cas pass it back and forth across the table until it’s out, until Cas feels like he’s hitting the ceiling.

It’s in this state that the door creaks, and they turn around to watch Dean peek into the room. He sniffs and breaks out in a grin.

“Smells like someone’s having fun,” he says, looking at Charlie. Cas snickers, and Dean’s warm eyes jump to him instead. “Oh, man. _Oh_ man. Don’t tell me she got to you, too?”

Dean meanders over to Cas’s seat, bending down to take a better look at his face. Dean lifts his chin with one finger and warmth spreads out across Cas’s cheeks and down to every one of his fingers and toes.

“She corrupted my angel,” Dean says, smiling. Before Cas realizes what’s about to happen, Dean reaches out and runs his fingers through Cas’s hair, catching on a tangle. Cas looks up at him with heavier eyes.

“She didn’t corrupt me,” Cas insists, watching Dean closely. Were his eyes always this _green_? Cas’s are glued to him, transfixed. “I asked for it.”

Dean’s still looking at him all soft. He stands up and shakes his head at Charlie, and Cas sways toward him; it’s instinctive to close the distance. He wants to remind Dean that he’s not an angel anymore, either, but then he wonders if the moment’s passed until it’s been so long that it really _does_ pass, and Cas just watches him without rest. Dean’s hand lands on his shoulder and Cas stares as his thumb begins to stroke his t-shirt, brushing over the bottom of his collarbone.

“Do you want some?” Charlie asks.

Dean puts up his hands. “Can’t. I got some more research to do tonight, for Garth. You crazy kids have fun though.”

Charlie giggles. “We will.”

Cas doesn’t just want Dean to sit down with them; he’s _hungry_ for it. It seems as though he can feel every inch of the space between them burning in his fingertips, itching to reach out and pull him back in. He watches Dean walk out of the room and then turns around, blinking at the movie screen, trying to get reoriented with the plot through his hazy memory of the first forty-five minutes. He thinks he can feel Charlie watching him but either he’s wrong or simply too slow by the time he turns to check for himself.

He runs into Dean on his way to a bathroom break.

“You guys seem like you’re having fun,” he says, standing so close he’s practically trapping Cas in the hallway.

“We are,” Cas says. “How’s research going?”

“It’s good,” he says, near enough that Cas hears him breathe in deep. He studies Cas’s face for a long time, a small smile playing on his mouth.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Dean says, but he reaches up and knocks a hooked finger against Cas’s cheek and it drags down to his stubble, lingering. “Maybe you _should_ go see a doctor, Cas. You’re warm.”

Cas pulls his hoodie closed, hugging his arms around himself. “Charlie turned the thermostat on full blast.”

“Yeah,” Dean agrees, looking him over twice. “You’ve been acting hot and cold around me all day though.”

He and Charlie retire to Cas’s room afterward the movie’s over, resolving that they have plenty of time this weekend to watch the rest of the ogre franchise. Cas fishes some snacks out of the kitchen and comes back to find that Charlie has unloaded a board game from her bag and spread it out on the floor.

“Have you ever played Settlers of Catan?” she asks. Cas shakes his head. “Well, we’ll have to adapt the rules a little for two people but it should work out fine.”

They smoke another joint while they play, stinking up Cas’s whole room. He doesn’t really notice until he goes to the bathroom and comes back to the stench of it hitting him like a wall; he’s laughing as he sits down, because it’s suddenly obvious why Dean knew exactly what they were up to in the movie room as soon as he came into it.

“What?” Charlie asks, glancing at him.

Cas shakes his head. He takes his turn at the board game.

“Why did you come back to hunting?” Cas asks after a little while, after Charlie finishes telling him about a tulpa she helped take down after a couple hunters radioed her for backup, and Charlie looks up at him. “From my understanding, your role was done after what happened between you and Dick Roman.”

“OK first of all, don’t say anything _happened_ between me and Dick Roman. Sounds dirty,” Charlie says. She shrugs, adding, “And...I don’t know. I guess I’m just a sucker for a grand adventure.”

Charlie smiles serenely at him. She promptly moves one of her pieces and Cas realizes with abrupt clarity that he’s going to lose this game.

“Oh. Damn it,” he says, gazing at the board. Charlie tips her head back and laughs.

“So what was that moment with Dean earlier?” she asks. It comes out studious, not like she’s nosy.

Cas waves his hand in the air, frowning.

“I know. It’s extremely frustrating—I used to be able to hide it better.” He huffs. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“Don’t shoot the messenger, but it sounds to me like you’re in love,” Charlie tells him. “Trust me, I’m an expert.”

He gives her a look.

“Well, obviously,” he says impatiently. Charlie puts up her hands.

“Oh, excuse me,” she says. “You sounded like you didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just more intense than it used to be,” Cas explains. “I assume losing my grace had something to do with it. It’s not as dull anymore, it’s just...it’s always there. Maybe I’m only noticing it more often because I have all these other, new human considerations that should take precedence in my head, but I always find myself...” He blows out a heavy breath, eyes unspacing out to roll back to Charlie. “Distracted.”

“Tough break,” she says, clicking her tongue sympathetically. “You could...tell him you like him.”

“Are you insane?” he asks. “It’s Dean.”

“Right. That’s true.”

She frowns, thinking this over. Rolling his eyes, Cas redirects her attention by inquiring about her latest girlfriend, a warrior from an opposing faction in her LARP game. Apparently they broke up last weekend because of a dispute over their political beliefs, which is so far beyond Cas’s surface-level knowledge of human affairs.

In the morning, Dean makes them breakfast and sits around chatting for over an hour (well—Charlie and Dean are talking while Cas sits bowed over his sweet coffee and the police blotter on his phone) when Dean’s double backup cell rings. He looks at it, rolls his eyes and shows them a familiar unsaved number.

“What do you want?” Dean asks when he picks up.

“I’m outside,” Crowley’s voice announces over the speaker. “Would you be so kind as to let me in?”

“Are you kidding me? No!”

“Who is that?” Charlie asks.

“The King of Hell,” Cas grumbles into his coffee.

“Ex-king,” Dean amends. “Probably. I don’t keep up with their news channel.”

“I've been dethroned,” Crowley says. “And from what I hear, replaced by my horrible bitch mother. Who are you?”

“Uh—”

“Don’t answer that,” Dean says. “Crowley, what are you doing here?”

“I told you, I want to be a part of the team!”

“OK. OK.”

Dean hangs up and shakes his head at them.

“What is that guy, like, stalking you two?” Charlie asks.

“Apparently,” Cas sighs.

“Great. That’s great.” She stands up from the table. “Do I have anything to worry about?”

“Nah,” says Dean, munching on more cold french toast. Cas watches in mild horror as Dean soaks his bread in syrup until it’s dripping with it. “He’s all bark, no bite anymore.”

“He’s human,” Cas grunts.

“Cool...Cool, cool, cool.” Charlie sucks in a breath. “All the same, I’d like to get out of the bunker until that ex-psycho is gone. Cas, you’re gonna take me around town.”

He squints at her. “Uh—OK.” Actually, he’ll be glad for the company. When he does go out nowadays, it’s mostly to take a few turns around the nearby streets and look at all the bloomed flowers. An old woman a little ways away is growing the most wonderful camellias.

“—so I’m gonna go take a shower.”

When Charlie leaves, Cas and Dean look at each other.

“Dean—”

His phone vibrates on the table again, Crowley’s number visible on screen. Dean silences it with a grunt, but when he goes to scrape at his plate again, Cas reaches out and touches his wrist to stop him.

“Dean,” he tries again when he looks up. Cas licks his lips. “I want to apologize for being short with you yesterday.”

Dean frowns.

“What is up with that, man?” he asks, putting down his fork and leaning in. “You’ve been acting freaky for weeks.”

Cas bows his head.

“I know,” he admits. “I’m sorry. I’m finding it...more difficult than I anticipated.”

“You mean being human?”

Cas closes his eyes.

“Yes,” he admits. “You and Sam and Charlie—You make it seem so _easy_ . But I don’t know how to...make popcorn without burning it or wash the dishes right after I eat or cure a hangover! I don’t know how often I’m supposed to shower or clean my sheets or get a new license at the DMV. I never grew up with someone teaching me these things like you did. And now, all of a sudden, I’ve been cast out of my home...the only home I’ve had for _millennia_ . And I’m just expected to cook, and clean, and buy everything on my shopping list and pay off a whole bunch of taxes. I don’t know what I’m _doing_.”

He’s leaned across the table now, eyes huge, begging Dean to tell him the secrets of the universe. Dean’s the savviest, most street smart person that he’s ever met—that’s why it’s worse, maybe, when a voice in the back of his head whispers that maybe there _is_ no secret. That it’s all just something he has to learn.

Across from him, Dean is silent for a minute, taking this in.

“So you think,” he finally says, “that my parents taught me how to do any of that stuff? You think I pay my _taxes_?”

“Dean,” he sighs, exasperated. He shakes his head. “I’m just...I’m really struggling with all of this.”

Dean frowns, serious now. He leans down until Cas is forced to meet his eye, and Dean holds his gaze as their heads lift, in tandem like magnets. Dean points sternly.

“You know that’s not an excuse,” he says. “And you know that you have me, always. And Charlie. And Sam when he wakes up. We’re gonna help you figure all this out. You do know that, right?"

“I know.” He pauses. “I’m trying, Dean.”

Then, perhaps because they’ve gotten through to each other or maybe only because Dean is Dean and Cas is Cas, he forgives him anyway.

A month after Cas falls from Heaven, he’s sitting in the living room with his feet propped up when Dean gets back from visiting the hospital. He’s drinking one of Dean’s favorite beers and reading an Agatha Christie novel when he hears boots clunking in his direction. Cas doesn’t look up from his book.

“Have I mentioned how badly you need a hobby?” Dean asks, pausing in the doorway. “You’re turning into such a nerd.”

“Yes, you tell me that quite often,” Cas says, flipping over a page. He looks up. “How’s Sam?”

“The same,” he says, sitting down at his favorite table. 

He commences his new, most treasured activity: Railing against modern science for not being advanced enough and digging through the Men of Letters’ books in search of any information that might be of use. When he can convince himself to get out of bed, Cas helps.

Despite the long weeks of searching, Dean hasn’t found anything that can wake up Sam. It’s definitely not a regular coma, so the doctors are all but useless (Dean’s rants always accentuate this point in particular), but as far as they’ve read there’s not much lore on what to do after you complete a bunch of ancient trails to shut the Gates to Hell and completing this mission is supposed to kill you, but it doesn’t. Cas thinks it’s probably got something to do with Sam having demon blood, but surprise surprise, there’s not much lore on yellow-eyed demons turning babies into latent super soldiers either.

Dean flips his book shut: That means no dice. He’s already grumpy because Cas brought up Azazel again, and Dean gets his back up at the mere mention of his comatose brother going darkside once upon a time. This makes it very difficult to have a productive conversation.

“We could play a game,” Cas suggests. One of them accidentally tore off the corner of a page when they were reading. He balls it up and flicks it across the table.

“A game?” Dean repeats. “What are we, eight?”

“It’s interesting to experience the things humans invented just to amuse themselves,” Cas says with a shrug.

“No way. Let’s—let’s go out.”

Cas frowns, wishing he hadn’t flicked away the paper so he had something to fiddle with.

“Where do you wanna go?” he asks reluctantly.

“We could hit Waverly and Oak.”

Cas drums his fingers on the table. His mouth twists.

“I think I’ll stay here,” he says. “There is still quite a lot of exploring I’d still like to do.”

“Come on, Cas,” he complains, throwing down the pencil he was drumming with. “You’re always doing that, how is there even anything left to explore?”

“This bunker has many rooms,” Cas says vaguely.

Truth is, Cas rarely does much exploring when he pulls out this excuse. Mostly he lays in bed reading, or goes to tend to the garden he’s trying to get started in the astronomy room that nobody ever used. He thinks he needs to get some artificial light in there, but he keeps forgetting to put it on Dean’s shopping list.

“Yeah? Well you never show me anything cool.”

“That’s because all _you_ wanna do is watch TV and eat an extraordinary amount of sandwiches,” Cas retorts. “You don’t care about this bunker’s history like Sam would.”

He scoffs. “I don’t eat that many sandwiches.”

“I work very hard to keep you alive, Dean, I would appreciate some consideration for my handiwork.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” he says, getting up. “Well if you’re not coming, I’m gonna wear my good cologne.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“To pick up chicks, man.”

“Oh.” Cas flicks his thumb against the edge of the book he was reading. He leans back and rolls his eyes upward, sending up a quick prayer for mercy—not that anybody’s listening. “Awesome.”

Dean gives him a weird look.

“Do you have a problem with that?” he asks, amused.

“No.” Cas stands up. “I love it when you come home falling down drunk and wake me up at four in the morning.”

Cas misses Sam. He was good for breaking up arguments before they got nasty; without him they bicker all the way down the hall. Cas comes upon his bedroom first and gets comfy with (Sam’s borrowed) headphones and his mystery novel, as well as a joint that Charlie gave him last time he saw her. He only smokes half of it before stubbing out the flame in the ashtray he found in the clearance aisle last time he went to Goodwill, with a spider web painted starkly across the bottom and a fake insect drawn crawling along one of the silk threads. It’s not long before Cas notes movement over the spine of his book and looks up, pulling the headphones down to his neck.

“Last time you reorganized the bathroom, where’d you put the extra aftershave?” Dean asks.

“At the end of the hallway.”

He leaves. Cas puts his headphones back on, only to be interrupted again a minute later.

“It’s not in there,” Dean says before he’s even fully freed his ears.

“Then I don’t know.”

“You’re the one who spends every day wandering this place!”

Cas sighs. “Alright, alright.”

He gets up and starts pulling open closets at random. Honestly, he has no idea where anything is in this whole bunker if it’s not his bedroom, the kitchen or the bathroom. Nowadays he barely even spends time in the library unless they’re working a case, although Dean hasn’t been taking a lot of those lately either. He doesn’t want to venture too far from the bunker anymore, because of Sam.

In a closet close to the end of the hall, Cas finds big metal sheets piled up against the walls with a single, soft blue light glowing from behind. Frowning, he pushes one of the metal sheets over, then another. He feels more than hear the air shift and Dean appear at his back.

“What are you doing?” Dean asks.

“I think there’s something behind here…”

“Is it my aftershave?”

“I highly doubt it,” Cas says. “Can you help me—Get this—?”

Together, they push the metal sheets aside. Every inch they move, more light floods in from behind. Dean shunts him to the side, rolling up his sleeves, to get one of the heavier pieces out of the way and then the last few slide down, clattering to the floor with a sound like a gunshot, and Dean jumps out of the way of the sharp edges and knocks Cas back a step. Using Dean’s shoulder for leverage, Cas steps over the blockage and into a spacious room.

“Dean…”

Not a room. A _hall_.

“Woah,” Dean says, joining him on the other side. “Where the hell does this go to?”

Cas shrugs.

At the end of a dusty, dirty hallway that appears to wind under a sewer and up three flights of stairs, they find a backdoor—the bunker’s key opens it—that empties out into a disused, musty storage room. Dean jerks his head, and it takes the key again as well as a heavy, jacketed shoulder against the door, but then the next room springs open and light cascades across the floor right into Cas’s eyes. He grunts, squinting against the bright.

“Woah,” Dean says again.

The room clearly hasn’t been used in a long, long time. Pretty much every surface is coated in dust, and the sun shining in from the big front windows should probably be brighter than it is. So much furniture is stacked on top of each other, upended or straight up broken that Cas doesn’t immediately recognize the room for what it is.

“Check this out!” Dean calls. He’s crouched behind a long counter, and when he straightens up, there’s a half-full bottle of Jim Beam in his hand. “Score!”

Studying the room more closely, Cas comes further inside. Dean’s already shooting him excited grins while he pours himself a primer of old bourbon. As Cas sets an old barstool on four legs, he leans over the counter and Dean groans, clutching his stomach.

“It gets better and better with age,” he sighs.

Cas’s glance darts across his face. “Mhm.”

“You want some?”

He’s never experimented with weed and alcohol at the same time. He’s barely feeling it, but Cas shakes his head.

“What’s this old bar doing attached to the bunker, anyway?” Dean asks.

Cas glances behind him, at the windows. “I don’t know. Maybe it was a front…”

“Like a front door. Well, through the secret back door,” Dean says, shooting Cas a smirk like he does whenever he makes a dirty joke, but as usual Cas doesn’t get it. “It’s less conspicuous than going off the side of the road.”

Cas hums. The Men of Letters also looked far more respectable than Team Free Will ever has, so he’s not surprised that they bothered to find a front for their hideout as a way to slip in besides appearing to disappear through a sewer. Cas carefully doesn’t voice this thought.

“So they owned a bar,” he says instead, slowly.

He’s really becoming resigned whenever Dean gets that look in his eye.


	2. cornelia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Cas fell to Earth, he learned immediately about bad things: Cold and hunger, using shaded parks as bathrooms, what knives feel like on skin and how it travels up your arm when you’re the one doing the stabbing, being tired, being tired and not being able to sleep. Being very awake, with all the hours of the day in front of you. Using the bathroom and police sirens when you’re doing twenty in a forty-five. Lust.
> 
> But Cas is learning about good things, too: Sleeping into the afternoon, hard work’s sweat, Dean unclouded by eldritch senses. Lust. Maybe he listed that last one twice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one’s for: “it’s like a reconciliation scene. between two men”  
> tw: depression, manipulative behavior, canon-typical violence, op thinking they’re hilarious, weed and alcohol

“I don’t think that goes there.”

“And what do you know about building, huh, Cas?”

“I built _you_.”

Dean pauses. He shrugs and goes back to what he’s doing: affixing a rather large and ugly painting onto the wall. Dean puts it up. Realizes it’s upside-down. Puts it back.

“I think that’s where the bathroom sign goes,” Cas calls.

Dean looks at him for a long minute. Then the wall. Then back at Cas.

“Shit,” he sighs.

Cas is actually excited to play the role of New Bobby. Dean likes him a lot better than Garth, for one, so there’s much sniping all around the homefront these days; and also he gets to spend a lot of his free time on the phone with other hunters. Cas has really been flexing his people skills lately. A few regulars really like him. The real struggle is building up a network; he doesn’t know how the Roadhouse or Bobby ever did it. Perhaps they’re not offering their new friends enough alcohol.

Dean has made it his dual mission to fix up the bar, right after he fixes Sam. He’s been learning drinks that he cooks up for Cas to try lately, which Cas is pretty sure is related to the first laser-focused objective. Dean is extraordinarily dedicated when he wants to be; it was just easy to miss at first because he used to do, seemingly, the exact opposite of everything Cas asked of him. Things run much smoother now that they’re working in the same direction.

“Are you planning to take a break any time soon?”

“I don’t know,” Dean says, who’s smiling somewhy. “Is there a good reason I should?”

Cas shrugs. Dean has a beer resting on the counter, which Cas snatched about twenty minutes ago so he’d have something to pick and sip at. Dean banned phones in the bar because he doesn’t know if the bunker’s protection extends to here or if the bad guys would be able to track their signals, so Cas has nothing to do while he watches Dean fix the place up. He helps sometimes, when there’s need for an extra set of hands, but mostly he observes and tries to learn a few things about carpentry. It seems fitting that he knows the basics, right?

“We could go out,” he suggests.

Dean stares for so long that Cas looks down to see if he’s spilled beer all over his Mickey Mouse tee with a neck so relaxed he’s positive the Winchesters have been passing this back and forth since one of their many high schools, at least. The fabric is almost unbearably thin. At least there’s no tears, although he suspects that has more to do with nimble threadwork as he fingers a stray yarn poking out of the hem. Dean lifts his chin as Cas is contemplating his ability to sew, and whether he’d give him a crash course. It might be nice to have a hobby that has to do with his hands.

“ _You_ wanna go out?” Dean says.

Cas shrugs. He fiddles with the bottle again.

“Sure. We can,” Dean agrees slowly. “Dinner or drinks?”

Cas swallows. “Um. What?”

In all his past experience, Dean was the one who took the reins. He has opinions on where is the best place to drink depending on your mood and angle; he knows where not to go and which drink special can have Cas on the floor, if he feels like having a laugh tonight—but Cas trusts him. Reason number two he likes when Dean picks where to go: It’s less stress. Cas isn’t exactly known around the neighborhood.

“Well what did _you_ have in mind?” Dean presses, as though talking to a rather dimwitted child.

“Oh…” Cas wracks his brain for a couple seconds, as long as he dares without seeming suspicious. “Uh—Drinks, I guess. You...have a favorite bar?”

As predicted, Dean does. It’s loud and lit in an awful gold that’s both too bright and very unflattering. Their wings are juicy. The game on TV is close, the late night adult cartoons in the mirror above the bar are mildly uncomfortable. All their jokes skate the line of sexual innuendo or what Cas considers a moral failing on multiple different levels but Dean informs him is mere ‘political incorrectness,’ whatever that means.

“It’s mean-spirited,” he tells Dean flatly.

“Would you stop arguing about fucking cartoons with me, man? I’m trying to tell you something,” Dean says over a third beer and an extremely tempting pile of mozzarella sticks. Cas did not know fried food could be so incredible. “I—I found out something. Well, Krissy and her friends did. They were on a case last week and she ran into a couple of angels.”

At this, Cas sits up straighter, all ears now and definitely not thinking about cheese, fried and breaded. Well maybe just a little bit. It’s not his fault: He only discovered mozzarella sticks five minutes ago.

“Is she alive? Is she hurt?” he asks.

“She’s fine. Just a couple minor bumps and bruises,” Dean assures him. “The angels are human now. They don’t pack quite as much of a punch.”

Cas digests this frowning into his beer. He comes to see the fallen angels as beneficial—in this instance—and looks up with his stance resolved.

“What were they doing?” he asks unwaveringly.

“Uh—working, actually,” Dean says, blinking as though surprised. At this or Cas’s reply, he doesn’t know. “A couple of hunters found them when they fell, and they kinda...teamed up with each other, I guess.”

“Huh.” Cas tips his head, drinking his beer. “Ex-angel hunters.”

“Yeah, crazy, right?” Dean says, bumping him with his shoulder. Cas smiles. “What dumb son-of-a-bitch would go from Heaven to _this_ life? Willingly?”

“It’s not all bad down here,” Cas says, shooting him glances as he bends to scrape the edges of the little black bowl of marinara sauce.

“Yeah, I'm sure getting your wings fried was worth spending all your time shut up underground with me.”

“It was,” Cas says, and Dean glances up and his gaze must see something there, because it holds.

“I…Thank you, Cas,” he says eventually, and Cas nods.

“I’m just being honest, Dean,” he says, not sure why Dean’s looking at him like that. After riding Cas so much over the past several years about telling him the truth, always, he looks a little strange now that Cas actually is. “You know I always appreciate our talks and our time together.”

“Yeah, I—I know.” Dean clears his throat. “And I...um…”

Cas tips his beer to peer inside it. Being friends with Dean is exhausting sometimes, although it only recently started actually making him tired. Cas touches his shoulder.

Quietly, Cas asks him, “What were you saying about the angels?”

“Oh, right. Well, Krissy says they were talking about finding Metatron,” Dean says. “They mentioned something about a half-snake woman who’s all tuned into the angelic grapevine.”

“A half-snake woman?”

Dean looks a little more himself as they move away from the potentially volatile topic of _feelings_ , which naturally Dean avoids like the black plague despite Cas never going for the ones that would really make his head spin. Were Cas convinced that Dean was done teaching him things about life on Earth, he might even risk getting kicked out for good just to get it off his chest. Were feelings always this heavy, or does he just notice because now he spends his time around Dean 24/7? Dean would probably look hilarious if Cas laid it all on the line, though Cas doubts there’s any room in him to love Dean more. Well, he’s always been in for a penny.

“Yeah, I don’t think Krissy’s the best at relaying intel,” Dean agrees, “but she definitely got the name right. How many Metatrons can there be running around?”

“OK,” Cas says slowly.

“Yeah, so...if you want to go check it out,” he says, shrugging one shoulder. He looks at Cas sideways. “I have an address.”

Cas’s brow furrows as he thinks this over; then he slowly nods.

“I’d like that,” he says. Dean makes a move to grab his jacket, but Cas touches his arm. “Not tonight.”

“You seriously want to stay and have another drink?” Dean demands. “It’s _Metatron_.”

“I know, and I want answers. But Charlie’s coming over,” Cas says. “We’re supposed to watch something called a...D.E.B.S.”

“Oh, she made me see that,” Dean says. “It’s not bad. Crappy acting. Good tropes. Mind if I join?”

Cas looks up at him. “You want to join our game night?”

“Game night?”

Cas shrugs. Sometimes they play Connect Four or something. Mostly Charlie thinks it’s hilarious to call it _gay_ me night in her head, even if they don’t actually play one, but he hopes she won’t say this out loud in front of Dean.

“Yeah, I do. If that’s OK.”

“Of course you can come,” Cas says, looking at him. “You’re welcome to join me in almost everything I do.”

“Almost, huh?”

Cas shrugs and keeps his smile to himself.

Charlie brings along a pack of cards with pictures of wizards instead of numbers and a massive blunt that smells like cinnamon, which she says is “for later.” For now, she brings out an equally impressive bong and a bag of what she assures Cas is “premium kush.”

“You guys are so lame,” Dean announces, shaking his head as he ambles into the room. “Hey there, Charlie.”

“Hi, Dean.”

She gets up and gives him a hug, the best she can without fully rising out of her seat. Dean pulls a chair out.

“Cas says it’s cool if I join you guys,” Dean says. Cas carefully does not look at Charlie, whom he can feel looking at him.

“Are you kidding? A queen can never have too many knights hanging around.” Charlie thinks something that she appears to find amusing, because her lips quirk up in a smile, but she just finishes packing her bong and slides it to Dean. “Are you…partaking?”

Dean looks at both of them, a couple of times. When he reaches across the table, the other two break out in cheers.

“Not that we’re peer pressing you,” Charlie assures him when he’s tamping down the weed a little.

Dean looks at her. “Yeah. Right.”

He gives Cas’s skull lighter a split-second look as he takes it but doesn’t say anything.

“Sam would be...so pissed if he knew we were smoking in the library,” Dean says, coughing in between breaths.

A small crease appears between his eyebrows. Charlie’s busy taking her turn, so Cas reaches out and massages Dean’s shoulder. Under the lights, his eyes look redder than they probably are, but his lids are heavy when he turns on Cas and slowly raises his hand to touch the back of Cas’s.

“It doesn’t destroy old documents,” Charlie says. “Uh, I think.”

“Just once won’t hurt them.”

“Or it will,” Cas adds. “I assumed we all collectively agreed to make that choice.”

“Youch,” Dean says, looking at him. He stares back impassively. “Kinda robotic there, dude, don’t you think?”

“Do you guys have a sound system in this place?” Charlie interrupts them, which is probably wise because Cas is considering tipping forward into the frustration that’s pooling after that comment, although it’s inching further out of reach as Cas takes his turn.

The only place they have music is in the room they watch movies so they relocate there. Charlie pushes the long table up against the wall so she can pull them each out to dance with her, sliding around in socks. Dean resists her advances for a minute or two, but she’s very persistent; Cas takes a little longer to convince.

“Come on, Cas,” she pleads. “It’s easy. Look—You don’t have to be good! Look at Dean.”

“Hey,” he says, frowning at her; but then, more frighteningly, he turns his attentions on Cas. “She’s right, though, you know.”

Cas rolls his eyes.

“It’s not about not knowing how to dance,” Cas says. “There’s no _point_ to it. I’ll get sweaty and look stupid.”

“Isn’t the point just to enjoy yourself?” Dean glances back at Charlie. “I mean, that’s why I do it.”

“You never want to have fun,” Charlie complains.

“That’s not true—”

“Come on,” Dean says, stepping closer. He holds out his hand. “With me, then, one song. I’ll lead. I won’t let you go.”

Cas watches him, searching for signs of subterfuge, but Dean is sincere and so Cas gives a resigned sigh. This turn of events doesn’t surprise him completely. Dean hoists him off the table and onto his feet, and together they stumble into the big empty space Charlie created in the movie room where Dean grabs him by the sweatshirt, forcing him into movement. His smile is very very close.

He does lead, as he promised, but it was closer to another empty threat: Dean can’t dance for shit either. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have enthusiasm, hauling Cas around the room and all he has to do is make sure he’s stepping in the right direction. After he learns that Dean shows him a split-second before he moves his feet by squeezing his hands first, it grows easier to follow him.

They end up back in the middle of the room with the song nearing its final chorus. Dean lets him stay stiller, swaying in place and rarely asking him to spin.

“So, what’s your plan for when you find Metatron?” Charlie asks, and Cas can stop trying to dance now though Dean’s still bobbing his head and holding onto Cas’s hoodie. Charlie pauses, blinking like she’s just had an idea. “Jesus, that’s a stupid fucking name.”

“I don’t know.” Dean yanks on his sweatshirt, prompting Cas to look at him. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to kill him.”

“Sure.”

“Maybe.”

Dean’s hand drops off his hoodie. “Maybe?”

“It's a bit of a long shot, you have to admit,” Cas says, shrugging one shoulder.

“What, like it’s the first angel we’ve killed?” They look at each other. “What if he’s doing something bad that we don’t know about?”

“You’re worried about my safety,” Cas says, weighing the words. They taste good in his mouth, almost as good as the nearness of him.

“Of course,” Dean says, pushing on his shoulder. Cas blinks at him, slow.

“So wait are we waiting for?” Charlie asks, glancing between the both of them. “Let’s find this son of a bitch.”

The half-snake woman is a witch who had a spell go wrong in ‘76 and half her body grew these great, ugly, snake-scaly patches. She lives in Missouri, running what Cas initially thinks when he steps inside is a gay club, then a monster club, then a gay monster club. Charlie helped them do research for a week and a half before going home to safe, familiar Wichita, leaving the two of them to travel to Missouri together.

The club is brightly lit with cool tones and very, very loud. Cas never realized how extraordinarily head-splitting bars were before, in part because Dean prefers quiet, cheaper places and in part because as an angel he didn’t notice it so much, busy paying attention to several other dimensions and the Winchesters every time.

Dean’s flirting at the bar for drinks and intel, so Cas sips on a Manhattan and watches him work. He’s leaning over the counter to talk to the bartender, angling his back and hips in a way that Cas knows means he’s turning on the charm. As he’s watching Dean give the case his all, a shorter man with the most objectively beautiful eyes Cas has ever seen edges into and obscures his view. The guy’s smile is dazzling, he can’t help but notice.

“Hey there, handsome,” the stranger says. “Are you here alone?”

“No.” Cas gestures across the room. “I’m here with my friend.”

The guy turns around.

“Your friend seems awfully busy,” he notes.

“Yes, he’s...doing something,” Cas says, not bothering to pretend to lie because Dean says that he’s not very good at it. Cas drags his gaze from Dean’s back to this guy’s pretty face; it’s not the worst view he’s ever settled for, he thinks, assessing him. Good-looking but he doesn’t really do it for Cas. Maybe if they didn’t have a case to work, and if his alternative wasn’t spending the night with Dean. “Do _you_ know anything about what’s going on here?”

The man’s eyebrow arches.

“I think we were having a moment,” he says, smiling again. He nods at Cas’s glass. “What are you drinking?”

“Sorry,” Dean says loudly, appearing behind him. He claps the guy on the shoulder and grins, showing his teeth. The guy looks rattled for some reason, glancing at Dean’s hand lingering on his bare skin. “He’s on the job.”

Cute guy takes a step back. “Oh. You’re cops?”

Cas looks between him and Dean.

“...Yes,” he says eventually.

“And we’re working,” Dean adds. “So maybe you should...Alright, that’s great.” He slides into the booth opposite Cas as soon as the guy’s gone. “What the hell was that about?”

Cas inclines his head.

“I believe that nice-looking man was hitting on me,” he announces gravely.

Dean looks weirdly offended. “Really? _Why_?”

“Because this is a gay bar,” Cas says, arching an eyebrow, “and because sometimes people are attracted to me.”

“What? I know,” Dean says, shaking his head. “I didn’t...I mean, of course they are.”

“What?”

“I…” Dean swallows, glancing around the room. “That came out wrong. Of course he was hitting on you, you’re very...uh, handsome.”

Cas sits back in his seat, not expecting this. He suspects that heat in his face is translating to color, although he hopes it won’t filter through under these lights.

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” Dean says hastily, clearly wrongfooted even though Cas didn’t say anything. “Guess what I found out about Medusa?”

Cas still can’t tell if he’s being insulted or not, but Dean’s cute when he’s flustered. He relents to Dean’s diversion despite being aware of the neon sign.

“Medusa?”

“The half-snake woman,” Dean clarifies. “Did that guy have a forked tongue?”

“I believe so.”

“Kinky.”

“It’s a monster bar,” Cas reminds him.

“Right, which is why the witch is here. And guess what?” Dean raises his eyebrows. “She has a thing for Manhattans.”

Cas looks at Dean. He looks at his drink. He looks at Dean again and feels his stomach slough down into his shoes with a steady drip, drip.

“Oh,” he repeats, his voice coming out gruffer. He sits up straighter and watches his fingers clench around the stem.

“You got this,” Dean offers.

Cas hopes his glare is as effective as usual considering the dark lights of the club. Win some, lose some.

They find the witch leaning against the wall beside an open door, smoking a long thin cigarette and not even pretending to blow it outside but rather straight into the crowd. Dean shoves Cas in her direction with fresh drinks in each hand.

After a few minutes of talking and leaning close to her side like Dean told him to, the witch invites him into the back office to “hear each other better.” Cas feels in his pocket for his favorite knife, a short thick blade etched with sigils, and grits his teeth to follow.

The witch, who calls herself Sophie, loses her shawl on the rolling chair and leans back against the desk. Her legs are long and exposed, drawing the eye as she crosses them and raises her glass. Cas, painfully aware of her leer without the distractions of the club around them, drinks more of his cocktail than is perhaps considered polite when he _Salud_ s her too.

“So,” she asks, setting her drink down. She looks up at him from under long lashes, the lights in here dimmed but not as dark as it is outside. “What are a couple of hunters doing in my monster bar?”

Cas freezes. An alarm goes off distantly in his head, different from the one that sounded when he thought she was going to jump him.

“You know who we are,” he says.

“Well I didn’t bring you back here to flirt with you, sweetheart,” she purrs. Sophie’s gaze flicks over him and seems to find something lacking; her upper lip curls delicately into a sneer. Cas crosses his arms.

“I thought I was doing very well considering I’ve never had the occasion to do that with a woman before,” he says.

“Darling, as sweet as it is that you wanted me to be your first… _flirtation_ . I run a gay bar. You’re _in_ a gay bar. Do the math,” she says. She pushes off the desk and is across the room in a flash. Cas shrinks back against the door, feeling behind for the knob. Shit, shit— “Are you here to kill me?”

She frowns up at him, all theatrics. Her fingers land on his chest and splay. Her nails grazing feel like a threat.

“No,” he says. “I mean, I hope not. We want information on Metatron.”

This appears to be the wrong thing to say. Something flashes in Sophie’s eyes, and her demure playfulness is gone: Tripping back a step, her expression abruptly shutters over into a defensive snarl. Cas barely has time to pull his knife before she mutters a spell that pins him to the door, flat. Struggling against her magic, Cas manages to flip his knife. Sophie’s close enough he can plunge it up into her arm without wresting off her magic, and she cries out, wrenching away from him. The knife falls to the floor out of reach. Sophie drops back, baring her teeth, clutching her wrist.

“I told them not to send any more angels,” she says, an edge to her voice that he thinks sounds like _fear_.

“Who?” he demands. “Who have you been talking to? Who are you afraid of?”

“Metatron isn’t a threat to you anymore!” she says. “I just want you bastards to leave me alone!”

“Sophie—”

“I don’t serve demons, I don’t serve angels, and I _certainly_ don’t serve plain old men,” Sophie shouts.

She grabs Cas’s knife off the floor and he shouts out, sure she’s going to run him through—but she only cuts him with it. Even that stings like hell: Cas struggles, but her magic’s still holding him in place. She’s whispering over the blade now: Whatever she’s doing with their blood, mingling together on the edge of the knife, Cas can feel her magic climbing from his stomach all the way up his throat, choking him, until he thinks he might puke on it. _That’s_ one human experience he’s happy to put off as long as he can

“Sophie,” he begs. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, meeting his eyes. “I just need to buy myself some time. I don’t want to hurt you either. I didn’t want to hurt any of them.”

“Then don’t. Please...I just need to make sure...my family’s safe.”

Sophie raises her eyebrows. It does soothe him a little bit that the regret etched on her face seems genuine.

“I have a family too,” she says.

She’s been drawing a sigil on the wall with their amalgamated blood, and now she slams her closed, red-stained fist into it. Cas feels something snap inside and her paralysis magic breaks; he doubles over, clutching at his ribs.

“Dean,” he gasps, too weak to be useful. Something is wrong inside his body. Something’s not right and it’s focused on the agony there...

Sophie shoves him away from the door, and he’s too blind with searing-white pain to fight her. He crashes into the far wall, right into a bookshelf, and the bookshelf falls. Cas hits the floor first followed by a long cascade of heavy tomes on his head, and something crushes his left leg, sharp and painful and Cas cries out, trying and failing to twist out from under it.

He hears the door slam into the opposite wall, still struggling fruitlessly to move, instinct telling him to chase her. Cas’s favorite, most familiar voice shouts his name in the distance. The door slams closed again, and then Cas is looking through a sea of fallen books at Sophie on the floor, Dean on top of her with a stranglehold on her neck, his knee trapping one arm and the other held fast by Dean’s hand.

“Cas, are you OK?” he calls.

He tries to say something, grits his teeth against the pain in his ribs instead. He thumps the floor as hard as he can from this angle to let Dean know he’s still alive.

“You better hope he’s in one piece, you goddamn motherfucking bitch,” Dean says with this dark, dangerous laughter.

“Please!” Sophie gasps. “I _just_ want my freedom. I didn’t ask to tune into angel radio—”

“We just needed a line on Metatron. We don’t care about you!” Dean says, slamming her back against the floor so hard the entire room shakes. “What happened after the angels fell, huh? Is Metatron still powered up? Is he planning something?”

“Metatron fell just like everybody else,” Sophie says, giving him a strange look. She’s stopped struggling. “He’s not the one you have to worry about.”

“Then who is?”

“The other angels!” she says. “They want his head on a platter.”

Dean considers this. “Well, what about Cas?”

“ _Who_?”

“Cas, Castiel,” Dean elaborates impatiently. He must squeeze her neck again because she gasps, clawing at his arm like a wild thing. “Are the angels out looking for him, too?”

“No! I never even heard about your friend until he tried to _seduce_ me tonight. Terrible play, by the way,” she comments. “Never send a man to do a woman’s work.”

Her voice is shaky but deliberately cool. Cas would admire her if he wasn’t so busy trying to hold his ribs in all the right places.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says dismissively. “So Metatron is here? I mean, he’s on Earth and he’s human?”

“Aren’t all the angels?” Sophie says. “Newsflash, Rocky, the Gates to Heaven got slammed shut. Everybody fell, that means _everybody_ . There’s nobody left on Cloud Nine now. But then it all just got so _loud_ —”

“Nobody cares about your psychic witch drama,” Dean promises. “If that’s all, then why did you try to kill Cas?”

“I didn’t! He showed up acting weird and just got in the way,” Sophie says. She and Dean look at each other, and Cas imagines they’re sizing each other up. He thumps the floor again. “Look, I’m a business woman. I don’t want any part of this celestial being _shit_ show, but the angels keep showing up trying to use me as their own personal FM signal! They think I’ll lead them to Metatron.”

“And did you?”

“No!” Sophie cries. “I don’t care about Heaven. The souls up there are free. I _like_ the way things are now.”

It’s not hard to imagine that Sophie’s got a few loved ones who she wants to make sure are set up alright up there; you can’t be in this life, playing with these stakes, and not have any skin in the game. Dean looks at her. She frowns at Dean. Finally Dean lets her up off the floor and Sophie dusts off her sheer violet dress, curling her lip. She jerks her head toward the exit.

“Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to my bar,” she says, all haughty and self-assured once more now that she’s on her feet and out from under Dean’s fury. “Perhaps it’s best if you collect your friend over there and go.”

Her purple shoes walk out of his line of vision, and the door opens and then slams shut. Dean says his name, voice jumping down an octave once Sophie’s gone. Then the books on top of Cas’s head begin shifting.

“Cas? Cas.” The bookshelf jostles; the horrible, sharp pain in Cas’s leg intensifies, burning brighter than his ribs for a split second as it dots the other pain out. He shouts, but the bookshelf moves off of him completely as Dean lifts it back upright. “Cas—”

“Stop,” he grits out, feeling Dean’s hand on his shoulder.

“What happened? What hurts?”

“My...ribs. I think my ribs are broken,” Cas says. He painstakingly shifts onto his back, flinching, and mumbles curses in a dead language. “My leg definitely is.”

“Yeah, you’re bleeding pretty bad too,” Dean says, though he seems relieved now that Cas is talking to him. Dean touches his forehead, brushing away a lick of blood from his hairline, and despite the state of things, Cas’s body flushes warm. “Witches are some nasty fucking bitches, huh?”

“You can say that again,” Cas huffs. “However, perhaps with less implied sexism next time.”

“Don’t lecture me again, man,” Dean groans. “Can we get you out of the evil monster lair before you go all women’s studies one-oh-one?”

“Yes,” Cas agrees. He deflates. “I can’t walk, I can barely move and you can’t call the paramedics.”

“I’m waiting to hear some solutions here, Cas.”

Cas raises his eyes to the ceiling and lets out a long, heavy breath. His mouth twists as he looks back at Dean’s face, close and frustrating and desperate to help.

“I suppose you’re going to have to carry me,” he says in his slow, serious voice, hoping that the universe will finally do him _one single_ favor this year by opening a giant hole in the floor to swallow him whole.

Two things about having a broken leg, several dislocated fingers and a couple of snapped ribs: It fucking sucks, and it’s kind of awesome. Cas is allowed to lay in bed nearly all day; when he’s in a good mood, Dean even brings him breakfast. He’s only expected to make an appearance for movie night and when Dean cooks something special for dinner, although Cas suspects that he’s been going out of his way more often recently to do just that.

It’s only awful because, two weeks into Cas’s healing, Dean takes a shapeshifter case without him.

It should be a traditionally easy kill, silver blade to the heart, no big deal. Cas doesn’t sleep much the first night Dean’s gone—tosses and turns the second, third and fourth night too. Not being able to instantly heal himself is awful. Knowing Dean’s alone on a case is awful, too.

Six days after he leaves, Dean picks up his backup cell on the fourth ring.

“Hey, Cas,” he says amicably, because he stopped getting annoyed about these late night phone calls on day three. “You’re in bed already?”

“Usually,” he says. He gets more comfortable against the pillows. “I am planning on going to sleep soon, however.”

“That’s good. You’re getting on a regular schedule.”

Glass clinks on the other end of the line. Cas tilts his head.

“You’re at a bar,” he surmises.

“What? No, I’m just making good use of the mini fridge,” Dean says. “So what did you get up to today?”

“I beat my old high score on Minesweeper,” he says after a minute’s thought. He hasn’t moved much today, it’s hard to recall doing _nothing_.

“Have you been using my laptop again?” Dean complains. “Man, I told you not to touch my stuff. Your phone—”

“Is slow, because you didn’t pay the bill before you left,” Cas reminds him.

“Yeah, alright,” Dean mutters. His voice is warm as butter in Cas’s ear and much more fond. “So that’s all you did with yourself today?”

Maybe he’s imagining the note of judgment in Dean’s voice, but probably not.

“I also cleaned the kitchen,” he offers.

“Look who’s finally making himself useful,” Dean congratulates. “Did you get a chance to look up that name I mentioned earlier?”

“Yes,” Cas says. “So get this—”

They talk shop for a little while, finding a possible lead for Dean to check out in the morning. Cas’s eyes start getting heavy during a long debate about whether Dean should buy a new butterfly knife; his old one’s getting dull, and he would rather replace it than spend the time to sharpen it. Cas sighs, making a mental note to do it himself when Dean gets back.

“Are you close to finding your shapeshifter?” he asks, because his chest is aching and he wants to tell Dean goodnight to his face for once. It’s frustrating that he can’t fly over there to help this all go faster. A lot of things piss him off nowadays, though, and it’s old hat to push this aside along with his other hang-ups.

“Nearly,” Dean sighs. “I should be home in a day or two. Listen, man...How you feeling?”

“Bad,” Cas says. “Also the heater has been acting up all day, and the cold air’s making my broken leg ache.”

“Alright, princess, dial back the dramatics. I’ll fix it when I get back,” Dean says. He sniffs. “But I meant...how are you feeling about all this Metatron stuff? We didn’t really get a chance to talk about it when…”

“When I was screaming in pain while you set my leg back into place?” Cas asks wryly. Dean huffs a laugh that curls warm and familiar in Cas’s ear. “Yes, I suppose we should talk about that. Metatron’s still alive…”

“Which means you’re in danger. You know, maybe it’s a good thing that you’re benched for now. The angels are still on high alert out here—”

“You think it’s a good thing I had my ribs snapped?”

“Of course not,” Dean says impatiently, “but at least your brothers and sisters don’t have a clear shot to kill you. No, it’s better that you’re safe at home.”

“I suppose,” he sighs, more because he doesn’t want to talk it about any longer. He remembers he has a half-gone joint in the ashtray and digs his skull-and-flowers lighter out of the drawer. “Maybe it’s all good news. If the angels are focused on going after Metatron, then they’re not going to spend their energy trying to find me.”

“That so?”

“Yes. I’m not worried.”

“Oh, you’re not worried?” He can _hear_ Dean rolling his eyes. “Is that you talking or the indica?”

“Sometimes, I do think we’re two halves of a whole.”

“My God you sound like a hippie. You know, I wish you’d take the actual _medication_ I gave you.”

“You do know you’re not a doctor, right?” Cas says. “Those were leftover animal tranquilizers from back when Sam was dating his vet.”

“They’re FDA approved painkillers,” Dean counters. “Just promise me you’ll take the damn medicine, alright, so that I can sleep easy?”

Cas sighs. “OK.”

“Great,” Dean huffs. “Look, Cas, I gotta go. I’ve got to go back to the coroner’s office early tomorrow morning, and now I’ve gotta track down that ex-girlfriend of his and retake her statement.”

Dean always has to go places and talk to people. Eyes straying back to the book he was reading before something one of the characters said made him think of Dean, Cas murmurs, “Be safe, Dean.”

“Who, me? Always,” Dean says, and then softer: “I’ll be there soon.”

‘Soon’ seems to mean varying things to Dean. Sometimes, when he’s bothering Cas about waking up early for a case, it’s synonymous with ‘now.’ Sometimes it means in an hour when Dean’s done at the shooting range, or whenever he happens to remember to take out the baking Cas asked him to get from the oven (usually ruining Cas’s desserts is a group effort). When it comes to a shapeshifter, apparently ‘soon’ means another half week before he returns safe and sound.

Dean spends that afternoon sitting on the foot of Cas’s bed, first relaying his kill, then just shooting the shit; every once in awhile he reaches out and pats Cas’s shin beneath the blanket. Cas feels more grounded and present just knowing that he’s home at all, even when he leaves to nap and then cook dinner. Cas can hear him singing at the top of his lungs while he works, horribly off-key. He smiles and turns another page in his book.

Around seven-thirty, there’s a knock at the door.

“Seafood medley in five,” Dean announces, swinging into the room without invitation. “Tell me you’re hungry, because I made a lot.”

“I am...very hungry,” Cas says. “Will you pass me my crutches?”

“I’ll do ya one better,” Dean says. He leans the crutches against Cas’s bed and then reaches down, helping him to his feet first. Dean steadies him with a hand low on his back, eyes flicking over Cas from up close as though the proximity will help him assess his condition. “Man, you are all busted up.”

His eyes linger on Cas’s hairline, on his cheek.

“One of the many fun downsides I’m learning to cope with,” Cas says dryly, moving out from under Dean’s hands. He stumbles, curses—and Dean’s there, his hands hovering near Cas’s sides as though to stop him from hitting the floor. “Dean, I’m fine.”

“Yeah, you seem back and better than ever.” Dean’s eyes trace the ceiling. “Don’t make me carry you again.”

“Please stop bringing that up,” says Cas.

Dean’s smile is soft and near as they shamble up the hall together. Cas makes it to the kitchen with few additional hits to his ego.

Dinner is quiet. Cas doesn’t always eat in the kitchen with him; sometimes Dean brings a plate to his room and sits on the end of his bed pretending like he’s not watching Cas finish his dinner, but usually Dean just leaves him alone if he doesn’t feel like company.

“This seafood is very good,” Cas tells him when he’s clearing away their plates.

“Thanks,” he says, his grin stretching with his posture. Cas watches him fondly despite the mood that’s settled over him like a scratchy, uncomfortable blanket. Dean’s very proud of his kitchen adventures ever since he got a kitchen to experiment in. “Let me check out your stitches before you go into hiding again.”

“My stitches are fine.”

“That’s what you said last time right before you pulled them open,” Dean says. His jaw works beneath prickly skin, at least two days’ worth of stubble built up on his cheek. “Would you sit down and let me have a look?”

Huffing, Cas sits back heavily in his seat. Muttering something that’s probably not very nice but impossible to hear, Dean grabs the first aid kit and pulls a chair around to face him. Cas shifts, trying to figure out where to put his gaze when Dean’s face is this close but he keeps finding his way back to his eyes, steady on their job. Dean usually hates when he stares like this but he must not notice now, because he’s focused on his work as he carefully peels back the butterfly bandage on Cas’s forehead.

“You know, I’m not trying to baby you,” Dean says, fingers poking around the edges of it. “Head wounds are serious business, man, I just wanna make sure that you’re alright.”

“And you don’t believe me when I tell you I am?”

Dean’s hands drop to his lap. He studies Cas’s face, eyes darting all over it from inches away. Cas watches back and focuses on even breathing.

“I’m just trying to help, Cas,” he says quietly.

Cas’s mouth downturns. He doesn’t look at Dean again while he carefully cleans the wound, checks his stitches haven’t popped out from all Cas’s squinting and smooths the bandage back over. His fingers leave warm trails on his skin. Cas hates fighting with Dean but he still frowns while Dean works, the palms of his hands itching with the need to get out of this kitchen, to go somewhere with a lockable door. As soon as Dean sets his hands on his knees and gives Cas a terse nod, he struggles up, fumbling for his crutches.

“Thanks,” Cas says grudgingly, sparing a glance down. Something’s clearly gotten to Dean, because he’s glaring balefully at the legs on the table rather than look at him. “For dinner, and for fixing me up. I’ll...be in my room if you need me.”

“Sounds right,” Dean mutters darkly.

Cas stumbles, awkward and very very slow, to the door. When he glances back, Dean’s pouring a hearty glass of bourbon and checking his messages. It’s a painfully familiar sight.

Cas smokes and stares at the ceiling when he eventually makes it back into bed; he toys briefly with the idea of going to sleep early, then decides against it. Dean lent him a tape a little awhile ago; he puts it in his music player and tries to focus on the lyrics, but he’s finding it difficult to focus tonight.

Instead, he thinks about Purgatory. Every night; Dean prayed to him every single night. _Where are you, man?_ s and _I hope you’re OK. I need you to be OK_ s and _Come back to me. Just come back to me_ s. His human memory sometimes stalls, or fails, but Cas remembers Purgatory crystal clear. When he can’t fall asleep he turns each of Dean’s prayers over in his mind like quarters, one, two, three until he’s sitting there with memories falling out of his pockets. _I need you, man. Where are you? Listen to me, you sorry motherfucker, you had better be alive and kicking. You better be fucking OK or I’m gonna— Please, Cas. I’m not giving up on you. I hope you can hear me. I need you to be..._

It was a long, cold stretch of months running away from him. Pretending like he couldn’t hear. How often did Cas want to fly to make sure he was alright—or to help him when he definitely wasn’t? Now he lives just down the hall, and they can’t talk to each other at all.

After awhile, when he’s listened through the album twice and is no more tired than he was before (his leg is aching; Dean never fixed the heat), Cas gets up. He smokes the rest of what’s left in his bowl and then grabs his crutches where they’re leaning next to the bed.

The halls are dark and quiet when he leaves his room—thank God. It’s a slow trek up to the astronomy room.

Cas enjoys taking care of his plants. It’s calming and peaceful and he can clear his mind when he does it. There’s just him and his flowers and the rock music he leaves playing on low all the time, because he saw once on an episode of Mythbusters that flora prefers that genre to grow its greenest. Cas hums along to the song that’s playing and spritzes water on his aloe plant. He’s going to start making his own medicine; he and Sam used to talk for hours about the upsides of natural, holistic cures, although now he mostly watches nature documentaries stoned with Charlie and buys every plant that they mention has any additional properties whatsoever.

“You know, I’m still not used to having to come find you,” Dean says, and Cas jumps, turning around. His eyes go wide. Dean ducks through the doorway and inside and scans the ceiling that’s leeching fake light; Dean finally bought those artificial bulbs he needed to let this garden flourish. “I keep finding myself praying. I forget you can’t hear that anymore.”

Cas is still turning over the things Dean used to will his way in Purgatory in the back of his mind.

“What do you pray about?” he asks.

Dean tips his head, scanning him.

“For you to get better fast, when I’m pissed at you,” Dean admits, stepping closer, right up to the invisible line where his personal space ends and Cas’s begins. “For you to stop smoking so much pot. Sometimes, I pray you’ll do the dishes when I don’t feel like texting.”

Cas smiles at that last one, looking down. It’s a good joke, but he doesn’t believe it; Dean likes to save his prayers for important things. He always thought it made Dean feel more exposed than he cares to be otherwise.

“I wasn’t aware my smoking bothered you,” Cas says as an afterthought.

“Bothers me? Nah,” Dean says, rocking on his feet. “It _worries_ me.”

“Why?”

Dean looks away, examining the rows of plants. After awhile, it becomes clear that he isn’t going to answer.

“Did you...need something?” Cas asks eventually, when he catches on that Dean’s too _something_ to own up to what he feels. “I mean, you’re welcome to watch me tend to the flowers but…”

“But?”

“Well, you never have before,” he says, shrugging.

Dean grins. “You’re right. I didn’t come here for nothing, I caught a case.”

“And you...want me to come with you?”

“What? No.” He shakes his head. “You can barely walk, man, and I know your ribs are still jacked up. No, you need to stay here and rest. I’m just coming to let you know where I’m headed, and to say goodbye.”

“Say goodbye,” Cas repeats, the words landing somewhere just right of Cas’s heart and hovering, warm. Generally he doubts that Dean even recognizes how kind he is, but that doesn’t make it any less charming. Still, a pit opens up in his stomach beneath the admiration. “But you just got back.”

“I know, man, I’m sorry.” Dean runs a hand through his hair. “Striga case. It can’t wait.”

Cas frowns. “Where are you going?”

“Two hours north of here. I’ll text you the address when I get to the motel.”

“And you’re going alone?”

“No, I’m meeting Charlie tomorrow,” Dean says. “She’s gonna help me out on this one.”

 _Because you’re out of commission_ , Cas hears the underlying insult, though he doesn’t voice it; Dean’s too sweet on him to press a bruise.

“Oh. Good.”

Something is strange about Dean’s smile. He asks, “You know I can handle myself, right?”

“Of course I do. You’re the most capable hunter I’ve ever known,” Cas says honestly, still not quite getting him. “That doesn’t mean I don’t worry. I now understand how...fragile humans really are. So much can hurt us...”

“Nothing’s gonna happen to me. I’m too unlucky, God’s not done with me yet,” Dean jokes.

They look at each other for a long time.

“Be safe, Dean,” he says at last.

Dean nods and looks at him a moment longer before he turns to go; his eyes drift, almost unconscious, across the row of plants at his side as he turns, and Dean stops in his tracks. Cas frowns, confused. He follows Dean’s eyes to exactly what stopped him and ice rushes down his spine: Dean’s already turning back around with huge eyes and Cas, still standing frozen with no excuses on his lips, stares right back.

“Dean—”

“Is this pot? Are you growing pot?” Dean demands.

“ _Dean_ —”

“In my secret underground bunker where I am a legacy, you’re growing federal amounts of marijuana?!” he shouts.

This seems a bit of an exaggeration. True, Cas doesn’t know the intricacies of U.S. weed laws but considering Dean breaks several federal mandates on the daily, he assumes that between the two of them, Cas isn’t the one with the bigger rap sheet here.

“I’m not selling it,” he says. “The feds will never know it’s here. I only—”

“I _just_ told you I can barely handle seeing you smoke the stuff, Cas!”

“I didn’t know that when I bought it,” Cas says, rolling his eyes heavenward. Dean’s indignation is so _selective_. “It seemed more cost efficient than driving to see Charlie every time I needed to buy more...and the rude lesbian teenager who offered me some at the grocery store seemed very untrustworthy—”

“I don’t care why you did it, Cas,” he snaps. “Jesus Christ. You are _completely_ off the reservation! I thought you were just struggling to adapt to being human, but this—”

“Oh my God. Does it really bother you that much?” Cas demands. He steps closer, squinting up into Dean’s face. He never throws a fit with Charlie or Sam smokes. “I’ve _seen_ you do it too, Dean! What’s really the issue here?”

“My best friend hasn’t acted like himself in months and he’s turning into a freaking living _nightmare_ , that’s what’s bothering me!”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw it, Cas! I saw—” But Dean cuts himself off and turns away, cussing. He runs his hand over his mouth. Cas waits patiently, no stranger to Dean’s mercurial mood swings; when he finally looks back, his eyes are closed. Another telltale sign that he’s blowing everything out of proportion. “Back when Zachariah was trying to get me to say yes to Michael.”

Cas steps closer, considering this.

“That wasn’t real, Dean,” he says carefully.

Dean doesn’t shrug off his hand, but he doesn’t lean into it either.

“But I saw you, Cas,” he says, looking at him. His expression pleads Cas to understand, but he doesn’t, he can’t read Dean’s mind anymore. “You were human, and you were—upset. You didn’t handle it very well.”

Whatever Dean’s remembering, his expression makes Cas’s heart break.

“Dean…”

“It wasn’t just the drugs. You were...broken. Smoking, drinking, taking pills. I watched myself send you on a suicide mission, and you didn’t even care!” Dean’s voice is crawling toward hysterical, or his version of it anyway: A little less measured than usual, forgetting to be so gruff. But Cas knows him better than anybody, and he can tell. “You knew exactly what I was doing, and you didn’t even care.”

“Because I trust you. Not because I want to _die_.”

“You weren’t there,” Dean says, shaking his head. “Seeing Sam, it hurt, Cas. But seeing you act that way…”

“I can’t speak for my fake future self,” Cas agrees. “But me, Dean? Who _I_ am? I listen to you because I trust you. I care about you.”

He steps closer, hesitating before he lays his hand on Dean’s shoulder, halfway to his neck. Dean looks at him with big, terrified eyes that don’t do Cas any favors. He wants to give Dean anything when he looks like that: He wants to give him everything. But he already tried that, and it didn’t land him anywhere good.

Dean shrugs his hand off, looking at the floor. Something balls up tight and uncomfortable in Cas’s chest and his hand drops to his side. Curling into a fist, he nods sharply.

“This isn’t you,” Dean starts.

“Actually, it is. Apologies if that’s disappointing or repulsive to you.” Cas’s voice is thick with offense and vitriol and grief. He shakes his head. Two fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, he adds, “Go on your hunt, Dean. Perhaps killing something will make me more bearable to be around.”

“We are not done talking about this!”

“You know what, this concern is _really_ rich coming from an obsessive alcoholic,” Cas spits without thinking.

Dean rears back as though Cas slapped him. For a split second, looking at the hurt on his face, Cas regrets the words: but then Dean’s whole expression closes up in a snarl, and Cas doesn’t give a goddamn what he does as long as he leaves this room right now.

“Fuck you,” Dean snarls. “What makes you so damn special? _Everyone_ ’s human! And that’s your big hang-up? That’s what’s got you acting like a damn hermit? It’s pathetic.”

“What makes me special?” Cas presses. “Nothing! Why do you think I’m so torn up about it? And all you do is act like...I just need to get over it! But it doesn’t _work_ that way, Dean! I can’t get over my humanity because it’s an inconvenience to _you_.”

“I know you’re hurting, Cas! I tried to help!”

“How? By finding us hunts? By acting like everything is normal?”

“By being here for you!” he says, his voice cracking down the middle. Against his instincts, Cas’s heart jumps at the sound. “By giving you space to do your thing.”

“I didn’t want space!” he shouts, and bites his tongue hard enough to make him wince.

He can hear himself breathing; Dean studiously examines the floor. His expression won’t break, though: He looks like he wants to shove Cas up against the wall in a bad way, and now he probably could. He looks like he’s going to storm out and go solve a case guns-first. Probably could do that, too. Cas wishes he had his powers back. Cas wishes a lot of things, since going to Hell.

“You’re pissed at _me_ for not being supportive?” Dean says finally in a low, dark voice. “Sam’s in a coma!”

A pause.

“I know that,” he says.

“Do you?” Dean steps in. He supposes it’s meant to be intimidating, but that’s not what makes Cas’s breath catch. Damn him. Even when they’re screaming at each other… “You never ask how he’s doing, or God forbid actually go see him in the hospital! What the hell is your problem?”

“I have other things on my mind,” he retorts.

“Good for you! I don’t,” he says. “I need you on your A game for this one, and you’re not. You’re just flat-out _not_.”

“I...I’m sorry,” he says, confused. He didn’t expect Dean to say something relevant. Where’s his righteous indignation now? “I’ve been distracted…”

“Yeah, I know you have, Cas. And I get it,” he says. Only Dean can make his voice so hard and soft at the same time. No other angel or human in all the time he’s been alive has ever perfected the balance, not while they’re looking at him. “But we need you _here_ , man, with us. Sam needs you. And so do I.”

Cas frowns patiently at the floor.

“I should have been helping you,” he says quietly, at last.

A guilty fire has begun to burn inside him. Sam needs him, he does; and he should have been there for him. He owes it to Sam, after all, he’s half the reason Earth is so much safer now in the first place. Only monsters and powered-down angels and a few straggling demons left, oh my.

“Yeah, you should have,” Dean says. They look at each other for a moment, and then Dean shakes his head. “Look, man...I’m going to check out this hunt. I’ll—I’ll text you when I get there. See you in a few days.”

The air still feels stifled between them. Cas does nothing but watch the golden petal on the flower by his hip as he listens to Dean go.

Dean and Charlie work their case for a very long thirteen days.

He texts Cas when he gets there and then to check in that they’re still alive every night, but other than that it’s radio silent—at least from the other end of the phone. Cas spends his time doing all he can to help. He flips through books and all Dean’s bookmarked Internet tabs for relevant research for as long as he can keep his mind from straying. Somehow he can’t stop getting _bored_ —his mind just keeps shutting down and asking to look at the ceiling for a few hours until he inevitably slips into a nap.

When he’s not working, or distracted, Cas wanders around on his crutches with Sam’s headphones hooked around his head, one ear on, the other always listening out for abnormalities in the bunker that never come. (The Winchesters and five years on Earth have taught him better than to let down his guard.) At first he tries to aid in Dean’s endeavor of fixing up the bar, but it’s too hard with his broken leg and ribs that can’t move very far; even breathing still hurts sometimes if he takes too deep a breath. Cas rearranges a couple of chairs and then tires, and goes to the library to do more research for Sam instead.

Without Dean constantly shutting down his demon blood theory, Cas actually makes headway on a few promising ideas. He sets down a book about other ancient purification rituals and leans back in his chair, pleased that he’s got somewhere substantial to start tomorrow.

Out of respect, Cas stopped smoking in the library anymore but now he’s bored, satisfied with the day’s productivity and craving a game night. He wishes he could invite Charlie over so he could have her stop at the store on the way without him having to leave home for snacks. Out of luck, Cas makes an unpleasantly chilly trip to the nearest gas station at two in the morning. He prefers this to the 7-Eleven on the corner, because here the cashier is always drunk and they trade don’t-ask-me-anything smiles and she seems genuinely grateful when Cas, still unsure about tipping etiquette, gives her whatever coins come back as change.

Cas scans the various dips and salsas packed along the back wall, squinting to try and make his hazy brain focus. He’s been high most of the time he’s alone in the bunker, and it’s late, and his brain feels like it's moving through sand. He wishes he were in bed, or sprawled out watching a movie. They really need to get a couch for that room.

Eventually he decides to try his luck with some habanero salsa and what appears to be some kind of queso dip with no cheese-like substances on its ingredient list whatsoever. The drunk cashier gives him a lopsided grin, and Cas instinctively smiles back.

“No hot jerky this time,” she notes, accidentally ringing him up for the habanero twice. “No Combos either.”

“Yes,” Cas agrees in a slow rumble. “Dean is out of town. You already rang up the salsa, Caroline.”

“Shit, my bad.”

He makes another minute’s small talk with her while he finishes paying for his munchies. She pulls her flannel tighter around herself and waves as Cas pushes back out into the cold.

His borrowed car is where he left it, parked out front and old school as hell because he found it in the garage with all the Men of Letters' vehicles. Cas shifts his backpack to the ground and starts shifting aside its contents to make room for snacks.

From this angle, low to the ground, Cas can see behind the sparse and under-watered bush against the corner of the gas station. A tuft of white flops to the dirt, shakes, and steadies.

Frowning, Cas pushes himself to his feet. When he rounds the building to investigate, he pauses, looking down. His forehead creases in all the usual places.

“Hello,” Cas says. “What are you doing out here in the cold all by yourself…?”

“Good morning,” Dean announces when he swings the bunker open. “The hunt was awesome because _I’m_ awesome. I haven’t showered in three days and I don’t care. I’m getting a beer and then I need to hit the sack.”

There’s apparently no need for Cas to join the conversation, so he doesn’t; he hums idly to show that he’s listening and flips another page in his book. Dean’s probably halfway down the hall before he shouts—he curses—something slams. Mind turning over, Cas sits up in his chair and shut his book, instantly on high alert but—

“ _Cas_!”

—it’s far too late for preemptive damage control.

“Shit,” he mutters, scraping his chair back across the floor. “Shit...Dean, before you say anything—”

“What are you doing with a _dog_?” Dean demands, rounding the corner with the scruffy white mutt, now bathed and vaccinated, close behind him by the collar. Apparently unbothered at being manhandled, the dog sits down and lolls out her tongue.

“I found her behind the Gas N Sip,” Cas says.

“So you had to take her home?!”

“She was homeless, Dean,” he scowls. “She was lonely.”

“Shut up, Cas, you can’t tell when a dog is lonely.”

“She _wanted_ to come home with me,” he says stubbornly. “Miracle followed me all the way back here, without much calling.”

It’s true; she trotted right up to the backseat of the borrowed car without any fuss whatsoever. Miracle barked when they got back to the bunker and stuffing his set leg in the front seat of a car was worth it for the excited way she waited at the door like she knew she was coming home.

“You named her Miracle?” Dean says, pulling a face.

“Of course. Because she is. As are all of God’s creatures,” he says, getting to his knees. Dean lets the dog go and she bounds at Cas, knocking him on his ass. “He didn’t mean that, baby. The odds of you being born and us meeting on that night, at that Gas N Sip, it’s astronomical. _I_ think that’s incredible.”

Dean groans. “I don’t like dogs, man.”

“You don’t like angels either, but you took me in,” he says, turning to look up at him. “Give her a chance.”

“Cas…”

Thankfully, Dean doesn’t get to continue saying rude things about their new dog because his phone dings at that moment. Whatever the text says makes him straighten, the corners of his mouth turning down. 

“Aw shit,” Dean mutters, and pushes past the both of them toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

He ignores him. Cas and Miracle look at each other and creep to the end of the hall, where they can hear Dean at the front door, talking to someone—arguing. When it doesn’t abate after a minute, Cas tells the dog to stay quiet and follows him up the stairs.

“I told you this wasn’t the—Cas, don’t come up here,” Dean says, turning abruptly when he’s already halfway there. “No—”

“Who is it, Dean?”

“Straight from Victoria’s Secret!” calls Dean’s friend, and Cas’s eyes go wide. He yanks the door open right into Crowley’s beaming face. “Angel Wings!”

“If you attempt to hug me, I will find an ancient spell to turn me back into a seraph and smite you until you’re a pile of ashes on the floor,” Cas threatens.

Crowley backs off with his hands in the air.

“I just came by to see if Dean wanted to come grab a drink with me,” Crowley announces, shoving his hands in his suit pockets and rocking up onto the balls of his feet. “The Irish bar down the street is having a karaoke night.”

“I’m not doing karaoke with you,” Dean says.

Cas pulls on Dean’s arm to force him around.

“What is he doing here?” Cas demands.

Dean doesn’t look directly at him, eyes jumping from the floor to the door to the rest of the room down below. God, Cas really wants to beat that smug grin off Crowley’s mouth.

“He’s kinda been...hanging around,” Dean admits.

“ _What_?”

“You wound me, Dean,” Crowley says. “I thought we were becoming the bestest of friends.”

“I will stab you,” Dean threatens. To Cas, he says, “You remember that first day when he called me? Since then he’s been kinda...texting me. And dropping by.”

“You’re telling me you’ve been hanging out with the King of Hell?”

“Ex-king. Newly human,” Crowley reminds him.

“We’re not having sleepovers and doing each other’s hair, man,” Dean says. “We’re having _drinks_.”

“You just got mad at me for bringing home a dog,” Cas says. “You brought home a _demon_.”

“Ex-demon,” Crowley crows.

That afternoon, Dean and Cas stay on opposite sides of the bunker and don’t see each other all day. Cas holes up in his indoor garden with some pre-rolled joints, ready to stay up there for awhile. He assumes Dean’s drinking with Crowley, or getting betrayed by Crowley or throwing out his dog; whatever it is, he doesn’t hear him at all and makes sure not to go to bed until long after Dean’s taken his nightcap back to his room.

In the morning, Cas takes his cereal in his room and watches cartoons, stretched out and still robed from last night’s shower. He hears Dean get up and clatter around the kitchen around noon but it gets silent an hour or so later. He assumes Dean’s gone to look into things for Sam, as he usually does until it’s time to work on his car. He won’t tell anybody, but Dean’s always secretly craved routine as much as he hates it.

Cas sits up, remembering that he found something—something worth mentioning, something _useful_ , even. He sets aside the paper he was idly sketching on, too caught up in this strange show on Cartoon Network to do anything else after he finished his cereal: This anxious dog is plagued by ghosts.

But Dean’s not in the study or kitchen or garage working on Baby as he’s wont to do some afternoons, nor in the bath or his room. There’s really only one other place that Dean spends his time: Cas pushes open the bar and finds him there, indeed, wiping down the dusty bottles that are salvageable and adding a slew of fresh ones off a cart. Cas sidles into the room and Dean freezes for a few seconds before jerking his head at a barstool.

“How was your vacation?” Dean says once Cas slides into it as offered.

“Not much of one, being away from you,” he says honestly. Dean goes still and Cas clears his throat. “I just mean, no matter what happens, I would never want you gone.”

“Yeah? You have a funny way of showing it,” Dean says, going back to his task. “You’re always disappearing these days.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t been working on Sam’s case with you,” Cas says carefully, watching his hand trace patterns onto the bar with his brows pulled together. “I should have been more helpful…”

“I’m worried about him, Cas,” Dean says, looking up at him with shining eyes. His throat works. “It’s been months, and we’re not any closer to knowing what’s wrong with him…”

“About that,” Cas says, shifting.

He can still be helpful; he can still set things right by giving Dean what he needs on a silver platter, just like he always has. No, no, that sounds like a bribe set to make Dean care about him too, but he doesn’t need to try so hard. He already knows that Dean cares more about him than he can stand to admit. But it still feels good to give him what he wants, to have the answers when he asks for them. This is why it doesn’t undermine him when his brothers and sisters call him selfish: He knows he isn’t. Loving Dean is an exercise in thinking less about what he knows or thinks is right than he ever has in his long, long life.

Dean turns toward him with his eyebrows raised.

“I found something in the lore about people who have been ‘infected’ with demonic energy, and I don’t think they’re talking about possession,” Cas starts.

Dean groans. “Not this again. I told you, he’s not even psychic anymore—”

“Dean,” he commands. “Listen to me. I think Sam _was_ saved by his connection to Hell, so when he slammed its Gates, it didn’t kill him like it was supposed to. Now the line is severed, and that same connection is killing him.”

“What does that mean?” Dean asks impatiently.

“He needs to be purified.”

“I thought that’s what the trials were doing,” Dean says carefully.

“What? No,” Cas says. “If anything they probably intensified his connection to the underworld, making it strong enough to save his life. With the Gates closed, the demon part of him...wants to go back to Hell, for lack of a better way to put it. In Enochian, there’s a more accurate—”

“Cas.”

“Right.” He clears his throat. “The Hellish part of him—the blood that Azazel put in your brother...It wants to be at rest too, but it _can’t_. If we purify Sam’s blood—”

“He goes back to being human, and he wakes up,” Dean realizes. His expression furrows from thoughtful surprise back to serious in a second. “What do we have to do?”

“The same thing he did to Crowley, I imagine,” Cas says, spreading his hands.

Dean slides a glass his way and pours one of his own. They’re quiet for a few minutes, drinking in the good news—or contemplating what to do next. The air is light but feels thin; perhaps Cas merely hasn’t been under the real sun in awhile. Dean’s got the door propped open for fresh air.

“You put the nice bar stools out,” Dean notes.

Cas inclines his head. “Yes. I would have done more, but with my injuries—”

“It’s great,” Dean assures him. “Thank you.”

They fall silent again. After he’s done with his drink, Dean comes to stand in front of him, checking that his stitches are healing well. He rolls up Cas’s sweats to check the wound where the bookshelf tore into his leg, mindful of the brace.

“How are you feeling?” Dean asks, prodding around the tender scabs and beginnings of a scar.

“Peachy,” Cas replies, crossing his arms.

Dean looks up at him, barely doing anything to temper his smile. He squeezes his unhurt ankle and pulls himself up, falling heavily into the seat right beside him. Pulling his drink over, Dean tries, and fails, to seem casual.

“Cry yourself to sleep at all over being a real boy like us?” he asks. For such an insensitive question, Cas nonetheless recognizes a gentle voice, and he smiles briefly to himself especially as Dean’s free hand blindly finds his knee and squeezes there at the same time.

“I don’t have a problem spending my days here with you,” Cas tells him. “Or with my vulnerability. Or mortality and your perceived ‘weaknesses.’”

Dean snorts. Kicking the bottom rung on Cas’s barstool, he says, “Yeah. Right.”

“I mean it,” he says. “I chose this, Dean. I chose not to go looking for a solution to getting our wings back. And I chose to close down Heaven.”

“But Metatron tricked you.”

“I know. I still wanted to do it, Dean. For you,” he says. “That’s why I opened Purgatory and shut down Heaven...although it didn’t go down the way I expected it to.”

“You saying you would have chosen to be human anyway, even if you knew what Metatron was doing?” Dean says. Dismissively, like he doesn’t believe it.

“Yes,” Cas tells him, and Dean looks up. “I would make all the same choices, Dean, good and bad, if I had to go back and do it again. Because it made the world safer for everyone.”

 _Safer for you_ , he adds to himself. Because he’s trying to be truthful, even if Dean isn’t ready to hear this particular confession.

“That’s all I’ve wanted since I...allowed myself to want,” Cas murmurs, almost to himself. He looks at his hands in his lap. “I killed for this. And I don’t regret it...but...I was a god, Dean. I tasted what it was like to have my Father’s powers and I did terrible, terrible things with it.”

“Wasn’t all bad,” Dean mutters. Cas looks up and Dean, smiling gently, pushes his thigh. “You disbanded the KKK. And remember those shitty bigoted preachers?”

Cas can’t help himself: He laughs.

“Yes, I remember,” he says, warmer. It’s so strange to be sitting in a disused bar that nobody knows exists with a half-dressed man he saved from Perdition, discussing acts of godhood while Cas finds himself terrifyingly, undeniably human. His smile fades, leaving only a pinch in the middle of his forehead. Quietly, he says, “I have fallen further than I ever believed I could. Further than I conceived it was possible to fall. I was all-powerful. I was an angel with a mission, with a purpose. Now half my bones are broken, and I can’t even put a stupid bar back together—I can’t even make my own dinner. And I once found and reassembled the Righteous Man, who was _fated_ to…”

“Aw, don’t use me as a measure of your faith,” Dean sighs. It occurs to Cas that Dean’s hand is still on his knee. “You met me and look what happened to all that power and certainty. Huh? I just...break stuff. I broke _you_.”

“I didn’t lose my faith because of you,” Cas says quietly. His eyes raise and trace Dean’s face, who takes a long time to notice and look back. “I prefer to think that I simply...redirected it. Found something better to worship and believe in. I found free will—and to love as an act of that. You, and Sam, and Charlie. I don’t regret that, and I do think that’s a kind of faith.” He smiles and concedes, “Perhaps not the traditional kind that you’re more used to.”

“But what about God?” Dean’s voice is soft and dangerously lulling. Cas would tell him anything when Dean speaks to him like that; Cas would give him anything. In most ways that count, with him and all his family too, he already has.

“God is in everything,” Cas answers slowly. “Or he’s not. Either way, I have to make _my_ own choices that _I_ can live with.”

Hesitantly, Cas catches Dean’s shirt between the backs of two fingers and Dean sways closer. But he lets him go, and Cas’s hand comes to rest covering Dean’s own on his knee, where he splays his fingers out and lets them warm Dean’s own. For a beat, Dean’s frozen like that under his touch. It’s not the worst feeling in the whole wide world.

When Cas fell to Earth, he learned immediately about bad things: Cold and hunger, using shaded parks as bathrooms, what knives feel like on skin and how it travels up your arm when you’re the one doing the stabbing, being tired, being tired and not being able to sleep. Being very awake, with all the hours of the day in front of you. Using the bathroom and police sirens when you’re doing twenty in a forty-five. Lust.

But Cas is learning about good things, too: Sleeping into the afternoon, hard work’s sweat, Dean unclouded by eldritch senses. Lust. Maybe he listed that last one twice.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not hard,” Dean croaks at last, his throat sounding dry. “To have faith, I mean.”

“No,” Cas agrees. “Making my own choices, against what my family wanted, it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.”

“But let me guess, you would do it again and again if you got the chances?”

Cas thinks about Naomi. He thinks about how many Deans he saw as a bloody, murdered corpse on the floor, and how when push came to shove, Dean told Cas everything he needed to know on his knees in a crypt looking for the Word of God, and Cas didn’t do it.

“And again and again and again,” he murmurs, trailing his fingers over the back of Dean’s hand.

Dean swallows. He’s gone completely still, not doing anything as Cas touches his skin, not moving his hand where it’s clutched over Cas’s knee. Eventually he pulls on Cas’s robe until he leans over, inhaling a shuddering breath, and rests his head on Dean’s shoulder; his nose nudges into the crook of his neck as though it knows where it belongs and Dean’s cheek comes to lay delicately against the top of his head. He steals his hand out from under Cas’s only to slip his arm around his shoulders in a loose side hug, which feels nicer than he expects.

“You didn’t fall alone, Cas,” he whispers.

Cas breathes out, and breathes in Dean’s hard work and the worn leather and whiskey smell that clings to him like a second skin after so many years with both as all but bedmates. They sit that way silently together for a very long time: Dean is warm from hours of labor and smells like home where Cas is still buried in his neck.

“How did you find me in the garden when you couldn’t pray to me before?” Cas asks after awhile.

“What do you mean? You’ve told me about the little project you’ve got going on up there.”

Cas likes the way Dean’s voice sounds, so close to his ear. It rumbles through Cas like a brand new emotion, although Cas doesn’t have _that_ much experience in the matter; perhaps he’s not too far off.

“Yes, but you’ve never been there,” Cas points out. “I wasn’t positive you knew where the astronomy room was, actually.”

“I didn’t,” Dean admits, breathing out a laugh. “I’ve got Find My Friends turned on on your phone.”

After this sinks in, Cas pulls away from the inviting curve of his neck and stares at him.

“Have you been using Location Services to spy on me?”

“Only when I’m worried about you,” he says, shrugging. “Charlie showed me how to do it. I have her, Sam and a couple other people on low-level surveillance at all times.”

“Do you worry about me often?”

This makes Dean quiet for a beat.

“You know I do,” he says finally. He looks at Cas, and something he sees there seems to hook him, make it linger. Dean’s mouth opens slowly, like he’s trying to find the words, although when they come Cas imagines they were supposed to sound more casual like the tone implies. “You remember Purgatory, don’t you, Cas? That seem like some shit I’d do if I didn’t care about you?”

And Cas believes him, because it’s Dean, so he nods. After awhile he reaches out and takes Dean’s hand in the space between their barstools. He’s watching the light struggling through the dusty front windows, but from the corner of his eye, he sees Dean look down.

“Cas,” he says, and his hand spasms in his grip, a pleasant squeeze that Cas feels all the way up his arm in a way he’s not expecting, “you know when people usually do this, it means—well, you know.”

Cas looks from their hands up to his face. Dean’s got an exceptional amount of freckles this close, which he knew but it never fails to amaze.

“I did it because I’m intending to convey good will and affection through positive touch. Nonverbally,” he concludes. He inclines his head; this is not the full truth, but then Dean doesn’t always handle it well when he has it. He tends to…over-fixate on individual words. It’s merely effective that this excuse also lets Cas carefully step around what he knows Dean is really asking. “I hoped it might provide some measure of comfort.”

“You ever watch a romcom, Cas?” he asks, carefully pulling his fingers from Cas’s, one by one. “I know you and Sammy geek out about Ashton Kutcher and all that.”

Cas rolls his eyes, wondering if this is another one of Dean’s double-meanings that he doesn’t understand. Dean may as well be allergic to saying anything without piling on five layers of _thick_.

“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” he tells him patiently.

“Most of the time it’s only done by...couples. Sometimes parents and kids, but mostly, you know...You know!” he says, flustered and annoyed. Cas finally smiles, saving him from going on.

“Yes, Dean, I understand how dating works,” he says. Dean snorts, and Cas rolls his eyes and spreads his hands. “Fine, it’s a very bare-minimum understanding, but—”

Dean’s laughter is infectious. He elbows Cas in the ribs, and before he can help it he’s grinning too. The moment slips out from underneath them without a whisper or terribly awkward goodbye.

“So you’re human now,” says Dean when they’ve settled a little. “That means…”

He makes a very vague gesture. Cas’s brows are coming together again.

“Dean,” he sighs, tired of plucking this conversation out of him thread by thread. Where’s the rest of the blanket?

“You must...feel those types of things. Now,” Dean says. He clears his throat, shifting uncomfortably. He won’t look Cas directly in the eyes.

“I’ve always had feelings like this,” Cas says. He pauses, thinking that Dean will misunderstand. “Well...Recently, anyway.”

Dean coughs on his beer. Cas turns toward him, concerned, his hand hovering over Dean’s shoulder.

“You...You have?” Dean chokes out.

“Yes.” Cas frowns at him. “Isn’t that what we were just talking about?”

“I meant for someone...specific…”

Dean seems to be piecing something together now. He’s frozen in place, half-turned toward Cas with the rest of his sentence trailing off into dust. Choosing to save him, again, Cas slumps closer to him; their shoulders are almost brushing, shirts whispering against each other when he sits back. He hopes it provides some comfort even if it’s not all that he’s willing to give.

“I’m not stupid, Dean,” he reminds him in a low voice. “I know what holding hands mean and I can follow a simple conversation.” Dean clears his throat, shifting, but the back of his hand is still in the same place when Cas’s fingers reach down and brush it. In that same slow, melodic drift Cas adds, “And these feelings...they’re not _that_ new.”

Dean looks at him and takes a slow, shuddering breath. His shoulder nudges Cas’s when he sits back, the line of his back curving as he leans against the bar. Perhaps Dean’s simply not the hand-holding type; his fingers brush up Cas’s slow and trails his wrist on their way to settle on the back of his neck. His thumb trails up past his hairline when his hand splays and squeezes. A strange feeling is settling in Cas’s chest, warm and new. It burrows out a nest in his heart and makes a home.

“I’m content to stay your friend if you wanted,” Cas says.

“I just...You used to be an angel. I didn’t know if it would all... _work_ the same,” Dean says, his cheeks dusky red. Even in the dim afternoon sun coming through the dust-ridden front windows in patches, he glows. Or maybe it’s sweat; Cas still has a keen eye, rose-colored glasses be damned. He’s intelligent enough to know his own weak spots, and Dean is a big one with a bullseye in the middle. “I didn’t know if you could feel things like that. Even as a human.”

Cas breathes out a laugh, pulling him closer. He pauses an inch away from Dean’s shoulder and doesn’t press his lips there: Instead he brushes his nose against his white undershirt, closing his eyes and breathing in the nearness of him. Cas rolls his forehead against Dean’s shoulder and shuts his eyes.

In awhile, Cas will get up and help Dean organize bottles until his leg or ribs tire him out, and Dean will make him laugh with a stray joke or pour him another drink to coax life back into his bones. Cas will stay and watch Dean build until he retires for dinner or wants to nap; or perhaps he’ll grow bored abruptly, as the mood sometimes settles over him precipitously, and find that he barely has the energy to make it back to his room to lay down. Dean will help him walk if his crutches are too much work. Dean will sit with him in the dark if he asks, or lean against the headboard with him watching a movie until dawn.

“Cas,” Dean says, breaking him from his reverie, and Cas looks up with a gentle _Hmm?_. “Now that we might have something to get Sam back, we’re gonna be kinda busy the next couple of weeks. You know, healing him, bringing him home.”

“Most likely,” Cas says. “The books don’t say anything about how long it will take before he’s back to normal. Or what the effect will be on him, given that he’s not a demon.”

“I know there’s risk,” he says. “We can deal with all that shit tomorrow. There’s just one thing I wanted to get out of the way, and I’m, uh...I’m afraid the moment’s gonna pass. Shit, maybe it already has.” Dean laughs, sounding uncharacteristically nervous. He smooths his hand back through his hair, making it fall a different way. Cas watches the way that simple gesture changes him and feels that nestled warmth in his chest flap its wings, newborn and hopeful. “Look, I don’t know the next time we’re gonna get to be alone with nothing life or death on our plates, and I don’t know when I’m gonna get the chance to do this again.”

Dean’s face is very close to his. Cas’s heart is racing in his chest, leapfrogging wildly past his reason. He’s thinking things...letting his imagination run away with him. Another thing he discovered the past couple of years.

“Do what?” he asks.

The first thing that touches him is Dean’s fingers, curling into the t-shirt lying against his chest. Dean’s breath is shaky on his face—against his mouth. Cas is pretty sure his breathing’s coming faster in response. Dean’s eyes drift shut, then open again, enchanting colors blinking in and out of view as he steels himself visibly, strength working its way up his throat and all over his face.

“Tell me you want this, Cas,” he says, his voice quiet and croaky, shaky but grounding. “Just...tell me you want this too.”

Cas brings his hand to rest against the side of Dean’s neck, pulling himself closer across the gap, and then just stays there basking in the moment and drinking in the view, the smell of his skin, the feeling of his mouth electric-close. Cas has had this exact thing before with him, but never like this. Never when he thought that he might actually get what he wants.

“Dean,” he says, and he hears how his voice sounds, grating and liquid-low.

Dean moves first, but Cas bridges the gap just as much and lets himself get pulled in until Dean’s kissing him: hard at first, then softer and sweeter until his hands loosen their death grip on Cas’s t-shirt. Dean smells even better up close, _Dean_ is better up close where Cas can hear the quiet hitch in his breathing and revel in the way Dean doesn’t let him breathe, pressing in for more whenever he tries.

Cas has to minutely tighten the grip he’s slid into Dean’s hair for him to let Cas breathe. Dean’s mouth is shaky, hovering close, and there’s a shift deep within Cas, something he’s not used to feeling. It starts in the center of his bones. It’s tangible in the tips of his shaking fingers, in the upward curve to Cas’s lips, in the moments Dean catches his breath still tipped closer than he has to be and a pleased, almost smug smile tugging like the dawn across his face.

For the first time since Cas fell from Heaven, the air in the bunker is tinged with hope.


	3. ivy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: ptsd, weed & alcohol, lesbianism shoehorned in with determination and hard work, depression, who’s sam? and liberal references to op’s obnoxious interests
> 
> everything's growing in our garden, you don't have to know that it's haunted...the doctor put her hands over my liver, she told me my resentment's getting smaller...no i'm not afraid of hard work; i get everything i want.....

Sam’s ritual happens on a Sunday morning. Unlike Crowley, he doesn’t beg or barter or lie; he just lays there comatose hooked up to his machine. Cas feels bad for not visiting before, it’s true, but he’s here now—though the sight of Sam like this is twisting up his stomach, an unpleasant and almost nauseating knot right in the center of his gut where his heaviest emotions always lie for good at bad. Cas offers to be the one to do it, but Dean insists it’s his brother and the last thing he needs is Cas walking out of here with any more scars.

At a quarter past seven in the evening, Cas pokes his head out into the hall and watches as Cathy, the pretty round-faced night nurse who shoos Dean out after visiting hours are through at the same exact time most Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays wanders past for her rounds right on cue. She pokes her head in to remind them how much time they have left and then goes. Cas listens to her peek into two other rooms before he nods at Dean, who takes the syringe to his arm. They had to try to keep the doctor from seeing the puncture mark on Sam all day, edging around his bed whenever she came in to check vitals and the works.

“I don’t understand why Crowley has to be here too,” Cas grumbles.

“This already worked on me,” Crowley reminds him, looking up where he’s standing by the bedside with his arms behind his back. “I’m also a witch’s boy, so I know a few things about blood magic.”

“Kids, play nice,” Dean warns them. “Cas, do you mind?”

Cas shuts the door and angles his body between the square window inset in the wood and Sam’s face as Dean puts his hand over his mouth and starts muttering Latin.

He stops. The room settles. A minute later, Sam jerks awake with a gasp and starts thrashing.

“Nurse!” Dean yells, but he probably doesn’t need to because the heart monitor goes wild.

Cathy comes running into the room with two others on her heels, barking at the three of them to get out. Dean paces the hallway with his hands in his hair, and Cas and Crowley look at each other.

“You’re sure this will work?” Cas asks.

“Trust me, my mother was brilliant. A horrible and heartless shrew, but she was a smart shrew,” Crowley assures him. “I learned a thing or two about ancient spells and the like. Since when do you care?”

“What?”

“You’ve never shown this much interest in Sam’s wellbeing before now,” Crowley elaborates. “I was under the impression it was a source of tension between you and our...mutual friend. Am I wrong?”

“Has...Dean been talking to you about me?” Cas asks, his brows pulling together.

“Oh you didn’t know? How incredibly awkward of me to say.”

“That’s enough,” Dean snaps. “I have enough to worry about without you two bickering on either shoulder. Christ, when did my life become a cartoon?”

A doctor pokes her head out of the door.

“Are any of you family?” she asks.

“I’m his brother,” Dean offers anxiously.

She beckons him inside. He glances back before disappearing. Cas turns on Crowley as soon as they’re alone.

“Did he really complain to you about my actions during Sam’s convalescence?” 

Crowley raises his eyebrows. “Stings, doesn’t it? When he doesn’t trust you.”

“He trusts me,” he says shortly. “Don’t embarrass yourself, Crowley. I’m not jealous of a demon.”

“Ex-demon,” he reminds him. “And Dean’s new best friend.”

“I am his best friend,” Cas says louder.

“Actually, I was under the impression that we were a little bit more than that,” Dean chimes in from behind him. They both turn around and find Dean poking his head out from the room, looking strained and anxious, his voice all scratchy. “Cas, would you come in here?”

“Why only him?” Crowley demands, and Dean shoots him a look. He extends his arm and guides Cas through the door.

“Sam,” Cas breathes, relieved. Sam’s sitting up on his hospital bed, smiling in his direction.

“Hiya Cas,” he says, and coughs. “I hear you’re kinda responsible for saving my life.”

“Just your consciousness.”

“Alright well, all the same, I appreciate it,” Sam says, chuckling. Then it slides off his face as he studies Cas’s . “You’re human now.”

“Yes. I’m coping with it,” Cas says. “It doesn’t matter.”

He strides across the room and pulls Sam into a hug. Sam huffs a laugh into his shoulder and pats his back, then pulls him closer.

When he pulls away, he spots a glass of water on the bedside table and passes it back to Dean without turning away from his fallen friend; and Sam just looks him over, lips pressed together and smiling.

“Did I hear you talking to _Crowley_ out in the hallway?” Sam asks after a moment.

“Ask your brother,” he says, rolling his eyes.

One of the phones in Cas’s side drawer rings. He pulls it open and checks the caller ID.

“Deputy Director Fabray,” he says, propping the cell phone under his ear. “Mhm. Yes, she’s one of mine. Of course, I’ll tell the same to your boss.”

Dean put him on phone duty recently, a hobby to keep him busy so he doesn’t strain himself limping around. Cas latched onto it with surprising enthusiasm; his people skills are improving every time. Cas taps the ash off his joint and breathes out.

“Are you the top of the chain of command?” Cas asks suspiciously. “How much of my time are you planning to waste?”

He looks up to find Dean in the doorway with his arms crossed, debating on a smile. Cas mimes a phone and Dean’s face crumples in confusion.

Cas covers the mouthpiece. “Jody’s girls are mucking up a crime scene again.”

Seventeen year olds are determined. Dean sighs.

“Goddamn it, Claire,” he groans. “Seventeen year olds are a bitch.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll hold,” Cas tells the phone.

He puts it on mute, on speaker, looks at Dean and just waits. Contrary to the beliefs he held up until a few weeks ago, Dean is decidedly _not_ hilarious-looking when he’s thinking about Cas wanting him or the other way around. And while Cas is admitting he’s wrong about things, it actually is possible to love Dean more: He does it every single morning. Humanity still has a lot to teach him, it seems.

“Can I help you?” Cas asks.

“I was coming to see if you still had that Zeppelin tape I gave you,” Dean says. He claps Cas on the shin, though, and keeps it there rubbing circles into his sweats. “And to see what you were doing this afternoon.”

“Well, Sam’s finally out of the hospital…”

“And sleeping it off like a baby,” Dean says. “So there’s nothing we can do there, I thought we could take the afternoon…”

Cas tips his head.

“There’s a brewery tour that I saw last week. On my drive to make a memorial for Meg,” he says, and Dean looks down. “It’s not far from here.”

Dean’s face falls. “Oh. Uh…”

Cas reaches over and puts his hand on Dean’s wrist.

“It’s right next to their beer garden,” he adds. “They do tastings and very affordable specials on the weekend.”

Dean has a fantastic smile. Cas doesn’t get to see it nearly often enough.

“I do have that tape, by the way,” Cas says, leaning over him to get it out of the drawer.

He looks up before he pulls away, and he’s just an inch away. But Dean makes the mistake, not him: He leans in and kisses Cas, awkward and off-center, half kissing his cheek like he didn’t mean to do it but couldn’t help it, and like he thought he might pass this off as remotely platonic and then realized the futility at the very last second. Cas finds that it’s very easy to laugh when he’s this close, but then he messes up too by catching Dean’s eye, and he can’t help kissing him again. It’s not his fault that Dean’s presence grounds him. Always has, even before he recognized the pull for what it was. Being near him just felt _good_.

And getting better—he drops the tape and pulls Dean back with him, and they silently agree that he should push Cas backwards into his sheets. A rush of air punches out of him like he took a much heavier fall.

Dean just leans back, studying his face, his mouth open to say something. Maybe to talk himself out of it. It’s all well and good to waltz in and ask out his best friend, but having him actually in front of him for the metaphorical taking, well, Cas knows firsthand how those are two very different things.

“I love you,” Cas says, and Dean’s eyes change. He shifts, slightly, but maybe Cas only notices because he’s half on top of him when he does it.

Dean opens his mouth and closes it a few times. It becomes clear it’s not that he doesn’t _want_ to speak but that he’s struggling to remember _how_. Grinning now, Cas grabs him by his open button-up and pulls him down with intent.

“...and more than the day before that, and the day before that,” Cas says, because it’s true, and because Dean is a little funny after all: Eyebrows halfway up his forehead, not sure where to put his hands. He settles for balling them in the bed on either side of Cas’s head.

“Cas, I—” His throat works as he swallows and looks at the wall. Cas keeps his hands on Dean’s shirt but loosely, not pulling. Anchoring.

“This is Lieutenant Nile.”

They both jump at the man’s voice from the phone, laying forgotten beside them. Dean scrambles off him and Cas sits up so fast his vision dots unpleasantly.

Grimacing, Cas says in his most serious voice, “Hello, I’m Deputy Director Fabray…”

Smiling, Dean squeezes his shoulder and gets up. He mouths something unintelligible but along with the hand movements, Cas understands the gist. He shoos Dean out of the room.

At the door, Dean turns around.

“Wait...Cas!” he hisses unsubtly.

Tucking the phone to his chest, he whispers, “What?!”

Dean scratches the back of his neck. Cas‘s frown deepens the longer he looks at the floor.

“Uh…I just wanted to say...Me too,” Dean says.

Cas freezes, sure this can’t mean what he thinks it does; but then Dean is smiling like a bright sun, and Cas’s stomach drops straight into the basement. Seemingly pleased with his effect, though his nerves before make Cas suspect this was unintentional, Dean beams and disappears down the hall.

Lieutenant Nile sucks a bag of dicks. Cas, turning Dean’s face over in his mind when he said _me too_ , tucks a smile into his chest the entire call.

He finds Dean lurking in the library when he’s done, flipping through old books. Whatever it is can’t be important because when Cas touches the inside of his wrist and quietly says his name, Dean puts his tome back and turns around.

“Hey.”

“You look very nice today,” Cas replies, allowing himself his first breath. He wasn’t sure how it would be after Dean said those words, if his heart would ever stop pounding, but now that he’s seeing Dean’s face again it’s become a cool, constant kind of elation. “Are you ready to go?”

His foot’s encased in a thick contraption-like brace, but all he needs now is a little patience going place to place. His ribs feel better, so it doesn’t hurt as bad when he stumbles and braces hard against the bottom of the bannister on the stairs to the garage. Dean frowns.

“We need an elevator in here,” he mutters.

“Please find a car so we can go.”

He’s not done listing the benefits of elevators, but he does lead them to a sleek cherry red thing, flashy. Cas doesn’t know much about cars but Dean is clearly salivating.

The brewery tour is fascinating. The building is just four big rooms but the history behind it takes the tour guide hours to explain; Cas expected Dean to complain a lot more, but he’s totally into it.

“I didn’t realize they’d give us drinks on this thing,” Dean says, leaning into his side to talk below the guide reeling off facts, hummingbird-like.

That would be why.

“It’s a beer tour,” Cas says. He touches Dean’s wrist to draw his attention. “Which do you like better?”

“Come on. The cider’s good, but it’s _cider_.”

Shaking his head, Cas marks it down on the little card. The tour guide is going to find a personalized brand they’ll buy and take home based on their preferences from the samples.

“What?” Dean says, determined to press the point. “You think there’s any cider that can even _compare_ —?”

“Dean.” He nods to the right. “The group is moving on.”

After the tour, Cas cajoles Dean into buying two cases of the beer the guide deduced was perfect for their palate. Dean wants to see the beer garden after all and cracks open the top box right there. As the sun starts to set, fireflies come out, and Cas watches them weave in and out of the nearby flowers from the picnic table he’s perched on top of, half watching the night sky to pick out constellations in his head and some of his attention on Dean.

“OK, I have to admit that beer witch knew what she was talking about,” Dean says.

This prompts Cas to try his too. He considers and pulls a face.

“Not dry enough,” he concludes.

“You are breaking my heart,” Dean says, shaking his head and staring. “I thought it was supposed to be a perfect match.”

“It is. For you,” Cas says, watching the fireflies again. “I filled out the card with your answers.”

Dean doesn’t say anything, but after a minute Cas feels a hand touch the small of his back, warm through his sweatshirt.

When they’re done enjoying the garden, and Cas ascertains Dean can safely drive them home, they leave. Dean seems sad to say goodbye to the pretty car in the garage, touching her trunk as they go.

“You tired?” Dean checks.

“No.”

“OK. I want to show you something.” A smile threatens to overtake him, but as usual he wins over his impulses. “Let me check your leg first.”

Cas sighs and rolls his eyes, but for once doesn’t argue because he doesn’t want to pause a good day for a fight that will end the same either way.

Dean’s hands are quick undoing the brace by now, not least because he helped build it with Charlie. Crowley helped, which is why Cas still expects it to suddenly break down when he needs it most—but miraculous it’s holding, so far.

He tries not to think about it as Dean goes through his routine to his satisfaction. He’s ginger with Cas’s ankle, every touch, when he encases it back in the brace and helps Cas back up by both hands.

“Are you satisfied?” Cas asks dryly.

“Sure am,” he replies.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting, but it’s not for Dean to duck through the secret passage to his bar, now with padlocks on the back doors and a few extra obstacles in place against intruders, Winchester-level paranoia painted all over the walls. A few Cas recognizes as warding against angels, but it doesn’t hurt him anymore, now that angels are extinct. Dean’s just psychotically thorough, another thing Cas would make him talk through in therapy if it were possible for hunters to get the help that they all, in Cas’s not-too-limited experience, desperately need. He may or may not be keeping a list.

The thought of his former kind being gone stings, but that’s not why he stops when he gets into the bar, swaying off his bad foot.

Bright yellow lights overhang the narrow tables slung against the walls, leaving the big open windows gaping across weathered wood floor. It’s dark now, although the sun will probably look gorgeous coming through that way at sunset; for now it’s just streetlamps along the road outside. Backlighting rows of dark liquor, a sign reading _Rocky’s Bar_ loops huge in cartoonish red letters. The chairs are all set out, the music’s set lively but not distracting.

“You should drape lights around the windows for the night crowd…” Cas murmurs, tracing the outline in midair. 

“Hm,” Dean considers, already behind the bar gathering drinks for them. “I think you might be right.”

“Maybe curtains…”

“No curtains,” Dean says, wrinkling his nose. He pushes some brown liquor across the bar and Cas takes a heavy seat.

“No. But it needs something,” Cas says. Dean joins him on that side of the bar. “It’s creepy with all that darkness coming in.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and he made them drinks but he’s barely had any when he sets the glass down and puts his hand on Cas’s good knee. “Stop talking about the bar and look at me.”

He turns in his chair, fitting his knee between Dean’s.

“What?”

“We’re gonna do this,” Dean promises, leaning into him, hands on Cas’s thighs but it doesn’t feel like his usual advances. “I’m gonna work the new Roadhouse. I do the floor, you handle the phones. And cases…”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about the bar.”

“Would you shut up?” Dean asks, laughing, and touching his face. “I’m trying to give you a romantic speech here.”

“Well, I don’t need one,” he says honestly. He has what he wants.

Dean shakes his head, dropping it down between his shoulders. With a playful grunt, he yanks on Cas’s shirt until he tips forward.

“You drive me crazy,” he says.

Cas can’t help it; he breaks into a smile. The way he says it sounds a whole lot like _I love you_.

“Can I ask you something?” he says, tilting his head. “Is all of this a date?”

Dean looks at him for a long time. Maybe he can’t think of anything to say to that, or he can’t make himself give voice to it. He twists Cas’s shirt tighter and drags him down to his waiting mouth.

His hands release his t-shirt and smooth it back into place, first to be helpful, then slower before they find the rough sides of Cas’s face.

Cas looks at him, stroking his wrists. With a sigh, he looks at his glass of bourbon and drinks most of it in one swallow. Then he tips forward and kisses Dean again, cupping the back of his neck in one hand.

“Walk me back to my room,” Cas suggests, his thumb stroking up into Dean’s hair. His voice is low, throat burning from whiskey.

Dean’s eyes are wide, but he doesn’t need to be propositioned twice.

In the dark, Cas heard once, on TV during one of his many late nights with his sleep schedule all twisted up, Dean on a hunt and a fantasy binge easier than filling his own time; in the dark there is discovery, and possibility, there is freedom once someone has illuminated the places where they said there be dragons.

The hallway light sneaks under the door and glints off of Dean’s rings and the chain around his neck as he shifts, removing layers of clothes; and it’s in his eyes when he gets close enough to yank Cas in with a low sound and a tight grip on the back of his neck. Cas’s eyes are wide, and then they’re closed—and there’s certainly something he’s discovering here, kicking his feet with Dean’s in a bed that, despite being Cas’s, smells like the rest of the bunker which he thinks smells like home smells like _Dean_ , or maybe the other way around—he’s surely the first to find out about this? And this, and this and this.

Dean is kissing him, and Cas is finding freedom and daybreak and a lot of intriguing new buttons to push, wrapped around Dean in the dark.

Maybe he’s getting a big head again, like his family used to warn about. What can he say? It may mean something important to humans (he’s beginning to learn _how_ important, being around his friends) but every time Cas does something new, every time he _feels_ something new, he’s inventing something for angels. Ex-angels. Whatever.

So he makes himself at home in Dean’s arms and gets to creating.

Cas is coming to love the smell of the outdoor garden section at the butch superstore down the street. It’s where he spends the most time outside of the bunker: The first time Charlie and Sam showed him the magic of this place, he stayed for three hours debating between different types of flowers.

He finds the special plant food he was looking for and loads it into the cart. Satisfied with the day’s haul, he wheels back around out of the garden center, missing the outdoorsy smell as soon as it’s gone.

On his way back to the registers, glancing down aisles, a sign catches his eye and makes him pause. Backing up a step, Cas pauses—then wheels the cart around and halfway down the row. Finally curiosity gets the best of him, and he drops two buckets of paint and a huge canvas into his cart.

Back at the bunker, Cas hauls everything into the arboretum to sort through at leisure. He unloads the plant stuff first, making his usual rounds; leaving the bunker is hard and it’s harder to convince Dean to go out of his way to pick him up anything from a store he isn’t already planning to visit. Cas is learning how to take care of other living things by himself.

When he’s done with his garden, Cas turns to the rest of what he brought home today. After a little contemplation he goes to find the kitchen scissors and cuts the canvas until it can fit in the corner of the astronomy room, along the only wall that Cas hasn’t covered in plants.

He has absolutely no experience with painting, and only two big buckets that are supposed to be for the walls. He just knows he’s got a big ball of something in his chest, something sickening he thinks is great dark _nothingness_ on the bad days, and there’s a tingling in his fingertips that he thinks these colors might exorcise out. He doesn’t know how he knows it, but that’s the answer.

The morning wanes on a messy canvas and rows of happy plants, although Cas doesn’t know it locked away in the bunker. He only registers the time when the door opens behind him, and he glances at his watch as he’s turning around to watch Dean amble up the stairs, running a hand through his bedhead. He comes right to Cas and winds an arm around his waist, pressing a warm kiss to his cheek: If his bleary-eyed look isn’t evidence enough that he just woke up, the heavy way he leans into Cas gives him away completely.

“What the hell are you doing, Cas?” he asks, looking over the spread canvas bemusedly.

Cas plucks a joint from his slack lips.

“I decided to take up painting,” he says.

Dean’s eyes are barely open, and he looks surprised when Cas holds up the joint, but then he leans in with hooded eyes on Cas and takes a long drag.

“The hell do you know about painting?” Dean asks.

Cas shrugs.

“I’ve been having trouble…doing things,” he begins.

“Yeah, I noticed that.”

Cas elbows him. Grinning, Dean ruffles Cas’s hair and throws an arm around his shoulders, pulling him closer. Cas rolls his eyes, and Dean cups his face and smiles close until it’s all that Cas can see: His happiness, his brightness. He gives in and lets Dean kiss him and kiss him.

“It makes me feel good to take care of things,” Cas says when he’s catching his breath. His fingers trail down Dean’s sides. “This garden...Miracle…”

“Me?” Dean guesses, still smiling. That’s divine intervention right there.

“You don’t need anyone to take care of you,” Cas says, because it’s easier than admitting he’s right. It works: Dean tips his chin up with one knuckle and kisses him again, a sweeter reward than he anticipated.

“Damn right,” Dean murmurs, still connected at the mouth.

His breath is coming faster; giving in, Cas pulls him in by the back of his hair. He can feel Dean smiling—he eases them back, gentling the kiss until Cas lets him go, feeling lighter than usual.

Dean takes a step back, giving Cas space to think. Running his hand through his hair again, he examines the canvas.

“So...You’re painting now?”

“I like helping things grow,” Cas says. He takes another hit off the dying joint before he abandons it in the ashtray, animating as the lightheadedness starts to sink in. “And Creation, it was the first act of love. Don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

Dean’s forehead is doing an adorable furrowing thing, and he still looks all fuzzy with sleep. Suppressing a smile, Cas looks down and spreads his arms to gesture to the whole canvas.

“Creation is the reason that existence started. It’s why we’re all here,” he explains. “So maybe it’s the reason I exist, too.”

“You think your purpose in life is...to do bad art?” Dean catch’s sight of his expression and his eyes widen. “No, no, that’s not what I meant!”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s good, Dean,” he explains patiently. “Creation, love, nurturing growth—it’s all the same thing. I don’t know if that’s the reason I was made by my Father. In fact, I doubt it. I think he made me to be a perfect soldier and listen to whatever the angels wanted.”

“Yeah, and look how that worked out,” Dean snorts. He pulls on Cas’s sweater until he comes close enough to wrap his arms around, nuzzling warmly into the back of his shoulder.

“Exactly,” Cas says. “But I chose my own path. Creation can be the reason I exist. I can make it my purpose.”

He feels Dean nod slowly into his shoulder.

“Hey, your purpose is creating stuff and my purpose is killing stuff,” Dean says. “That’s kinda romantic, we’re like night and day.”

Cas turns around.

“You’re not just a killer,” he says, and maybe because it’s early or because he’s not in the mood to get heavy or both, Dean interrupts him by kissing him instead. To be fair Cas lets himself get lured into it: Lets Dean slide his hands to his neck where it makes it hard to think and chases him when he tries to go.

Cas ran away from Heaven for this. He brought it _down_ for this. Because he watched Dean, and learned right from wrong from him. What do you do with that? Fall hard, even if you’re strong and disciplined to the heavens and back down to this man’s bed in the salt of the earth.

Or maybe Cas is broken like they all say. There’s turning out to be a lot to live for down here at rock bottom.

It’s a very lazy Saturday. They find their way back to Dean’s room after a couple of hours, and he’s dotted in paint but Dean still lets him into his bed to lay all over him while Dean nestles, half-asleep, into the pillow. They doze in and out all morning. The phones blessedly stay silent. Many thanks to whatever in the universe is putting monsters on the downlow in and around Kansas today; maybe they’re finally seeing the payoff to closing up Heaven and Hell.

When Cas wakes for the last time around two-thirty, it’s because of a loud rumbling right under his ear. He grunts and turns his face in the other direction.

“Dean,” he groans. “Turn that off.”

A soft laugh and even gentler fingers combing into his hair, and then:

“‘That’ is my stomach, handsome,” Dean muses. “What do you want me to do, cut it out?”

“If you must.” Huffing, Cas opens one eye. “Do we need to feed you?”

Squeezing him around the middle, Dean asks, “You would do that?” with his voice pitching suggestively and he laughs harder when Cas digs his fingers into his sides. He’s not awake enough for banter; getting comfortable again, Cas is just going successfully back to sleep when it happens again, and he sits up heaving a huge sigh.

“We should order a pizza,” Cas says.

Dean makes an agreeable noise and tugs on one of his arms.

“Come up here with me while you do it,” he suggests.

“That line can’t possibly work for you,” Cas says, but it clearly does because he lets Dean distract him for minutes anyway, digging his fingers into Cas’s bedhead and twining their bodies together in the warm blanket cocoon they’ve made for each other all night. Finally his own hunger kicks in when he’s been awake long enough to welcome it, and he tucks himself against Dean’s side and swipes his phone off the nightstand to find their favorite pizza joint in Dean’s recent history.

“How do you know my password?” Dean asks, but Cas shushes him as the other line rings and pulls one of his arms more comfortably under his back.

Because they can’t agree on whether pineapple belongs on pizza, they get two; and Dean has to pick it up from the shop because he won’t let a delivery guy within ten miles of this place. Cas takes Dean by the hand back to his own bedroom, and they pass by Sam’s door on the way and Dean pops his head into where his brother’s recuperating, tossing him a few slices of pie. When Cas’s room shuts behind them, he sets out the food on the bed while Dean flicks through his paltry record collection—the player scavenged and cleaned and repaired from the side of the road, one of Cas’s many new hands-on projects. He managed to find a few acceptable records last time he went shopping with Charlie that he knew would fly with Dean, thank you thrift stores wedged between offbeat music shops and secondhand, dark-dimmed bookstores. Dean settles on something from the eighties and sits at home on his side of the bed, nearest to the door.

“Just try it,” Cas insists, holding up a slice.

“For the last time, I don’t want your weird pizza.”

“ _You_ don’t appreciate human marvels.”

But he offers Dean the first hit from his bowl, which he takes; Dean seems to like the music more after he does, swaying side to side while he eats. Cas watches him for a minute, feeling warm, but he stops when Dean asks him what he’s looking at.

“You know…” Dean says when they’ve eaten their fills and Cas is mostly watching Dean pick at his toppings. “Before, when we were talking about how you’re handling things and I...I got mad and I said some things—”

“You told me that you didn’t believe I was special,” Cas supplies crisply. “And that you hated to see me like this.”

Dean carefully wipes his hands and puts aside his food.

“...Yeah, about that. I’m so sorry, man,” Dean says.

Cas tilts his head. It’s not fair to have an argument with someone capable of begging like that. His sorry expression is an unfair advantage. Cas didn’t know there were so many intricacies to fighting and forgiving before he met Dean.

“I didn’t mean that,” Dean goes on. “I should have helped you...I thought you wanted...”

“But you didn’t _ask_ me what I wanted.”

“Cas, come on.” Dean pulls on one of his crossed arms. Again with the heartbreaker routine. And the angels think he’s not a pushover anymore. “I’m trying to make it up to you here. Why are you smiling?”

“It’s OK. You don’t have to say it. Come here,” he adds, moving his box to the floor as well so he can sit up on his knees, take Dean by the back of his neck. “I love you. Come here.”

Dean seems a little surprised by the change of pace, and he needs a moment to get into it, but he’s brought down to the pillows easily enough. Cas nuzzles into his neck, pressing his mouth there so he can feel it vibrating against his lips when Dean talks.

“I love this song,” he says, and it’s just random enough that Cas huffs a laugh. Encouraged, Dean brushes back his hair and is smiling when Cas kisses his mouth.

“You do?”

“Yeah.” Dean’s eyes get shifty. “It’s why I picked out this record.”

Cas pulls back to study his face.

“Hmm,” he deduces, and pulls out of Dean’s arms so he can listen without distractions. He nestles up against Dean’s side and closes his eyes, and Dean allows it, stroking his arm vaguely in time to the drums and giving him the space he needs to fish the bowl out of the drawer.

It’s a nice song, nicer when he’s being tightly wrapped around and held against Dean’s mouth without any freedom to pull away. He pushes his hands underneath Dean’s t-shirt and feels him nudge his thighs closer, already pressed together chest to chest.

Dean’s half humming, half pressing kisses into his shoulder when Cas pushes his hands into his hair.

“And you thought I wouldn’t give up Heaven for this,” he sighs, shaking his head. He strokes Dean’s hair with intent, making him look up. Speaking directly to Dean’s lower lip, Cas adds, “I’m sorry. Your blinding self-hatred just seems minisculely ridiculous in this moment.”

Dean pushes him down into the pillows.

“You saying you did this all for me?” he says, aiming for a joke but Cas can see right through him: He means it and it’s painful for him to even think it, hence wrapping it in layers of irony. Cas curls his hands into the front of Dean’s t-shirt.

“Bringing down my kind? Yes,” he admits without flinching. “And everything before that. Purgatory, my initial rebellion from the grand Apocalypse plan, all of it. Because it’s what you would do, Dean, because you always do the right thing. And I wanted to protect you, because you taught me to always protect the ones you love.”

Dean’s eyes are massive.

“Cas,” he says, and his voice cracked right down the middle.

Cas tugs on his shirt and makes him close the distance. But that face is branded front and center in Cas’s mind, no matter how Dean distracts him and makes the air between them crackle and disappear.

Is it normal to feel drunk on somebody’s proximity after all this time? Cas kisses him, swallowing the soft gasp Dean makes right before his brain seems to kick into gear, and he cups Cas’s face in both hands and gives it right back. His teeth are on Cas’s lower lip, stirring up feelings he still can’t believe he has; some new things never get old.

Dean pushes his hands back into Cas’s hair, and the sudden pressure makes him freeze.

“What?” Dean asks. Like a confused animal, he kisses Cas again short and sweet, begging for a response because he’s been faced with sudden withdrawal. The urge to soothe him rises and crests.

Realizing his hands are trembling, Cas covers Dean’s with them and drags them down to hold against his chest.

“Please don’t hold me still like that,” he says stiffly.

He already has to contend with the cumbersome pain of broken bones; remembering the feel of that immobilizing contraption holding his head in place while his family drilled into him isn’t a feeling he wants to be reminded of when he’s doing good things like making out with Dean.

But it’s OK, because as he closes his eyes to draw in a breath, he feels Dean’s shaky on the corner of his chin.

“I don’t know what the angels did to you,” Dean says, his nose brushing Cas’s jaw, now, and his voice dropping even lower to a fierce, protective timber. “No one’s ever gonna hurt you or even lay a hand on you ever again.”

Cas huffs an exhausted laugh.

“I may be lacking in angelic powers, but I’m still good in a fight, Dean,” he says, rolling his eyes, holding Dean’s face.

Dean lifts his head. Cas has no idea what’s going on behind his eyes, and Dean is still such a goddamn mystery—a thrill arrows through him at the idea that he’s got all this time spilling out in front of him to pick Dean’s brain at leisure. Years and years and two human lives of time, entwining and shooting off in a strange direction together.

“I shouldn’t have sent you into that witch’s bar as bait,” Dean says, his voice aching. “That’s _exactly_ the kind of asshole move my dad would make. Hell, he _did_ make it, and it got people dead. It got Jo’s dad dead.”

Cas looks at him for a long time. Dean’s expression is tortured; it takes Cas a while to dredge up his sense of levity, although he’s cultivating that every day.

“You’re getting kinda heavy for a Saturday afternoon,” Cas says eventually. He yanks Dean down to kiss his shocked, slack lips. “Now get off of me. I want another slice of pizza.”

But he’s not sure how else to tell Dean all the things he wants him to know, just that he has the urge to tell Dean everything. So Cas does the next best thing he can: He convinces Dean to let him drape them both in his feather-down blanket (a Christmas gift from Charlie, the first he’s ever gotten) and wraps him in warm skin and kisses they’re both laughing into, and he winds them together so they can take a naught-earned, stretched-out, extremely pleasant afternoon nap.

The broken wheel on the desk chair spins a half-circle in the air again, then jams. A pause. More cursing, then a screwdriver tinkering with the joint. The wheel spins and cuts off with an awful grinding sound.

“Charlie,” Cas grunts. He nudges her with one foot.

“Sorry!” she mouths, tossing her hands in the air. She dusts dirty palms on her thighs as she gets to her feet. “I don’t know how to fix and build stuff! Where’s Dean?”

“Flirting for tips, I imagine,” Cas says, bored. Dean spends half his days up in the bar now that Cas and Sam are both back in working order and fighting fit. Without anybody to mother hen, he turns his paternal instincts on a crowd of new drunk best friends.

“Operation Roadhouse 2.0 is going well then?” Charlie asks.

“Very. We have a ton of regular hunters coming through now.” Cas tips his head onto his other shoulder before the hold music cuts off on the phone tucked beneath his ear, and Cas jumps upright. “Hello? Angela Mabel’s office? Yes, the rude blonde who came in this morning—”

As Cas is finishing up his very important phone call to lie Claire out of juvie (again), and he’s done reaming her out for good measure, Charlie gives up on fixing their guest chair and finishes constructing what appears to be a small triangle out of paper. Cas considers it with some trepidation as he hangs up on Claire.

“I told you, I’m taking it up with Jody this time,” Cas tells the girl. “No! You already went over this with Dean—You’re going to turn eighteen soon, Claire...Yes, I know. Claire!...Fine. Call me when you arrive at Kaia’s. Goodbye.”

He tosses the phone down and sighs, turning to Charlie ready to commiserate—but she’s got her triangle lined up and aimed, and he startles, putting up his hands.

“Make a goalpost,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

Charlie doesn’t wait for him to figure out what the means; she flicks the paper and it sails across the table and hits Cas square in the forehead. While she loses a hold of herself laughing, he levels her one of his patented extra-strength frowns: He’s got plenty of practice putting up with Sam and Dean all day long.

“Don’t you have something better to do?” Cas asks her.

She shrugs.

“No. Dean and I already wrote up the rules for the LARP festival...”

“Is that this weekend already?” he asks, trying to feign interest for her sake. This means that Dean’s going to be gone all weekend, which equals a lot of sleeping and painting on Cas’s part. Maybe Sam can find them a hunt so they’re not too bored without him.

“Yep. So I’m just waiting on you, slowpoke,” Charlie says, shooting him finger guns. He still doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean. “You said you’d show me Rocky’s now that it’s all done.”

“Oh, shoot.” He frowns at the cell phones laid out on the table. “I’m supposed to be on phone duty.”

“Well, take them upstairs!” Charlie urges. “I want to see the new digs. Plus Dean promised me free drinks.”

“We’re not supposed to take phones to the bar,” Cas says. “Dean says—”

“I’ve got a scrambler, dude. We’ll be untraceable.”

She rolls her eyes. Charlie helps him dump the phones into a small backpack to bring up to the bar.

The noise hits them before the light, but then there’s the telltale dim gold seeping from underneath the stockroom door. Nudging Charlie, Cas points to a case of beer for her to heave into her arms while Cas gets the last couple of locks, human- and monster-proof alike.

“Am I free labor?” Charlie asks.

“No. People ask questions when you come out of here empty-handed.”

“Is that because you were empty-handed, or because it was you and Dean?”

“Huh.” He glances back at her. “I don’t know.”

He gets the last lock then and they’re awash in the smell of spilled beer and leather and cigarettes, which is pretty much how Dean always smells anyway so it doesn’t really bother Cas, although the intensity coming from Rocky’s is a little much when it first hits like a brick wall. A small woman with a big knife in her belt catches their eye and says something to the bartender, and then Dean turns around and a smile breaks across his face like sunrise spilling over the night ocean waves.

“There’s my man,” he calls across the crowded room, loud enough for Cas to hear him, not so loud that anyone turns around.

Cas touches his face and kisses him hello, and then takes the vodka he was holding and finishes the drink Dean just poured, passing it to its buyer. The guy looks at him, and Cas gives him a look back, like, _what?_ He takes his drink and goes away.

Cas makes himself one too as Dean enfolds Charlie in a hug and shows her around Rocky’s. The woman with the knife smiles at Cas, enticing him to go over and fill Dean’s place talking to her. He stows the backpack under the bar so he can still hear the phones if they ring.

He doesn’t like being around so many people, but appreciates the one-on-one with this woman, Alicia, who’s funny and talks about her twin brother with clear love shining through. When she’s enjoyed her tour of the place and lost to Dean at a round of darts, Charlie comes back over and hones in on Alicia immediately. Dean slots in beside Cas and kisses him softly behind the ear when he shuffles around to get more juice.

“Don’t you think she’s a little young for you?” Dean admonishes Charlie when Alicia steps away to use the bathroom.

Charlie shrugs.

“She’s not _that_ young,” Charlie says. “She’s in this bar.”

“Barely. I remember her license, she just turned twenty-one.”

“You’re one to talk,” Cas says. “I’m innumerably older than you. I believe they call that cradle-robbing.”

Dean flushes all the way to his hair.

“I am _not_...that’s…” he says, in that blustering way that makes Cas want to kiss him, but he has to let Dean let it out first. Charlie’s losing her shit. “I’m an adult. Shut the fuck up.”

Cas laughs along with Charlie while Dean, frustrated and embarrassed, stalks into the back room to collect himself. Alicia comes back and asks Charlie what’s so funny, and after a few minutes of Charlie leaning in close to her and sweeping Alicia’s hair off of her shoulder, Cas belatedly recognizes his cue to go. Charlie gives him this complicated look that he’s finally well-versed enough in silent human exchanges to recognize as, _Finally, dude, I love you but you can’t take a hint_ and he smiles indulgently and goes to fill another order out of earshot. He lets Dean cool down alone until one of the phones rings, and then Cas has to poke his head in the back, holding aloft the burner and wordlessly switching places with Dean to answer the call.

“You’re not supposed to have phones in here,” Dean hisses.

“Charlie took care of it,” Cas whispers back.

The call takes a very long time. They keep putting him on hold to discuss “family business” amongst themselves, although he highly doubts his ability to find someone who’ll give Claire a key to the crypt she got caught breaking into last week. They need to have another stealth refresher ASAP.

After forty minutes of going around in circles with various relatives, the bitchy older sister’s wife has put him on hold again and he’s deliberating hanging up to work on the crypt keeper for a third time. Something crashes outside, and Cas cracks open the door with his finger on mute—but he ends up just watching Dean pick up a spilled case of canned beer. He sets them aside to be drunk in the back of the car or lazy on Cas’s bed, they’re too much of a spurt risk to hand out to customers now.

When he’s picking up the tipped over box, Dean catches him looking. The look he gives then makes Cas shrug off the door (phone on speaker so he can hear if the kind wife to the rude woman returns) and get close enough to unofficially pass into his orbit.

“We need to have Claire over. I think she needs to shadow you on more hunts,” Cas says.

“OK.”

Cas nods and uncaps the dog treats stashed behind the IPAs. Miracle’s taken extremely well to being a bar dog, and despite his initial protests, Dean’s taken extremely well to Miracle. Cas _knows_ that little traitor is sneaking off to sleep in Dean’s bed most nights, although Dean’s usually lying beside Cas in his room anyway, so it takes some sting out of the blow.

Ruffling the dog’s ears, Cas snags a beer from the cooler.

“When are we closing tonight?” he asks.

“What do you think of her, Cas?” Charlie interrupts their stilted conversation, leaning over to shove her phone in his face. He startles and touches the back of her hand, trying to steady the screen enough to see.

“What happened to Alicia?” he asks when it occurs to him that he’s looking at a dating app; Charlie had them each make a Tinder together one drunken night a very long time ago, before all this happened with Dean.

“She had a family thing and had to go,” Charlie says. She pushes her phone at him again. “Blonde cheerleader. What do you think?”

Dean snatches her phone.

“College cheerleader or professional football cheerleader?” he asks.

“For the Kansas NFL, baby!”

“Why the hell is this even a question?”

“Her bio has, like, three astrology references on it.”

“You’re not doing Tinder right. Let me see that,” Dean says, and swings himself over to sit next to her.

Rolling his eyes, Cas takes over bartending duty. The lesbians take him off hold and Cas slips in back to finesse a deal for his not-adopted not-daughter to go steal from a crypt. Yeah, he’s totally killing it with Claire.

“Cas chose this one. What do you think?”

“Sometimes, _very_ occasionally, Cas has taste,” Dean allows. When he got back, they were judging Charlie’s profile. “This one’s better than the one you’ve got as your main photo!”

“Hey,” Cas protests weakly. “I chose _you_.”

“Like I said,” Dean says, flashing his teeth. “You’re known for your rare show of taste.”

Cas rolls his eyes, bereft of anything to toss at him and too far to pinch his side or sock him on the shoulder. He turns away and cleans the pitcher under his hands with a wet rag.

“You're getting your sleeves all wet, Cas,” Dean says after awhile, which is when he looks up and realizes Dean’s silently watching him work. His head tilts. “Come over here.”

And so, leaning over the counter with his arms extended, Dean reaches to roll up his sleeves so he can work their bar without ruining his clothes. And Cas, being paid in Dean’s favor and the warm light of his soul that he can feel even if he can’t touch it anymore, lets him.

In the library, Cas turns a page in a large book of old alchemy tricks. Sam, sitting at the other table with his legs extended, is clearly texting his girlfriend that he thinks they don’t know about and pretending to read a hellspawn bestiary. Cas’s eyes jump to Dean when he appears in the entry.

“What do you guys know about decoding ancient runes found in demigod crypts?” he asks, Cas’s man through and through.

Cas shrugs. Sam shakes his head.

Jerking his head, Dean says, “Cas, we’re going to Wyoming.”

“Um...Why?”

“Because Claire and Alex are in Wyoming, and they’re calling in the big guns,” Dean says grimly.

After Sam got better from his ritualistic coma and purification process, he decided to retire from hunting for good. The universe probably owed it to him, a good life for all he gave. He’s going back to law school too—he recently got it in his head that he can still help the victims who want it. He became a full time Men of Letters and, when he’s not doing lore casework for them or answering the phones, he spends most of his free time digitizing the archives, an activity Charlie loves to throw herself into whenever she visits them too. Cas doesn’t know how Sam has any free time to date or sleep, but perhaps he should start eating more brain food and less of whatever Dean makes or orders in.

Sometimes Cas helps Sam with the archives when he’s needed there, sometimes he goes with Dean—whether he’s on a hunt, manning the bar or just lounging in bed in his underthings, although that last one is usually not for long.

Cas flips his book closed and gets up to find his gear bag that’s stashed somewhere in his closet underneath the sewing things and a box of weird games he found on sale at the mall when he went shopping for Christmas presents. He and Dean have expanded their pre-case routines, to-do lists expanding with the flipping calendar.

Dean makes sure Miracle has enough food for a couple of weeks, even though Sam’s more than capable of looking after her himself. He packs enough premade food that he doesn’t have to live off corner store sandwiches (Dean long survived on the road but, like his exposure to Cas, now spoiled he’ll get short if he goes without homemade dinners) and carefully chooses which extra books to bring for leisure, which he hides in the bottom of his suitcase so Cas can pretend not to see them. He’s learning many lessons, taking solo hunts with Dean.

For example, don’t touch the radio. Don’t touch his thigh for longer than twenty minutes or he gets ideas. When Cas keeps a hand on the back of his neck, Dean gravitates toward him even with one arm out the window, turning to catch his eye at every red light. He’s physically incapable of not running case scenarios when Cas is trying to nap, so he convinces Dean to hand over map duty instead.

“This is the closest one to the crime scene that’s less than sixty dollars,” Cas says, directing them into the parking lot on the right.

Dean goes to get them checked into a second floor Red Roof room that has a flickering light over the bathroom sink and a mini fridge he’s not convinced will be powerful enough to preserve all their carefully prepacked food. Dean grabs the first shower, so Cas scrounges a chicken veggie wrap and finishes the first episode of a very compelling dating show. This season is Valentine’s themed.

After he dresses in a shirt littered in strange, different-colored symbols that he stole from Cas, Dean goes through the fridge—frowning as he pokes at a questionably-cold aluminum foil wrap.

“What the hell are you watching?” Dean says, trying to reach over him for the remote but Cas pushes him back, safely away from the controls.

“I’m enjoying the debauchery,” Cas says, “from a distance.”

Dean chokes around a disbelieving laugh.

“Just from a distance?” he asks, and Cas doesn’t imagine how he nestles closer on the bed when he reclines toward the pillows, settling in with his food. Cas watches him carefully for a minute, expecting a retaliatory sneak attack.

“You’re an exception, as usual,” Cas allows. He doesn’t get why Dean still gets fidgety about that.

They enjoy the episode while they eat; or at least Cas does, and Dean doesn’t complain enough to ruin the show. He doesn’t get into it, but he bears Cas’s theories and exclamations with indulgent smiles and a warm shoulder against his own. Dean cleans up for them and gets ready for bed, and then convinces Cas to get ready for lights out too because Claire and Alex will be here early in the morning and they need one of them to book a room next door, neither one being eighteen for a few more months. Dean still doesn’t like minors coming here alone, which is another reason why he drove to meet them.

Dean’s left the dating show on while Cas spends his time in the bathroom, although he turns his brain off as soon as Cas climbs into bed: Dean’s lying on his stomach, but with his head angled to see the TV with one eye open and his arm draped across Cas’s waist. Cas sits up to watch it with the lights off, volume low so as not to disturb them as they sleep. He thinks Dean’s trying for it, even as his hand traces loose lines across the outside of Cas’s thigh.

“I can’t believe Rhonda would do something like that,” Cas murmurs, leaning forward toward the screen.

“Crazy,” Dean agrees tiredly.

Cas grins. His hand settles in Dean’s hair and strokes gently, enjoying the way Dean angles toward the attention like a cat seeking light.

“I don’t think they’re meant to be,” Cas continues, still smiling, this time because of the way Dean grumbles and shifts around to turn his face more comfortably away from the flickering lights. “I think she’s going to end up with Abram, after they get back together—”

Dean keeps yawning but can’t seem to sleep; he curls around Cas even while Cas talks through his show and generally pushes his buttons, for no reason except that he had a 5PM coffee and can’t get appropriately tired himself. Not long after Cas tries and fails for a fourth time to sleep, he nestles his head closer to Dean’s pillow. His eyes are barely open and his breath lands on Cas’s collar, comfortingly even.

At least until a commercial break. Dean has yet to win the battle against Cas smoking in their motel rooms, but Cas has yet to encounter a roadside motel that gives a damn what he does in bed.

He lights a joint that Dean nearly bit his head off earlier for spotting in the vicinity of his car and Dean absently passes him an empty beer bottle.

“What if the girls forget the iron chains again?” Cas asks, lost in thought squinting at the wall but he knows Dean’s listening.

Sure enough:

“Don’t worry. Charlie knows a guy in town who gets, like, _way_ too serious with his fantasy roleplaying—our LARP thing,” Dean clarifies, noticing the mystified look on Cas’s face. He takes Cas’s joint, angles Cas’s face toward him and presses over onto Cas’s pillow to breathe his smoke back into Cas’s mouth. Smiling, apparently pleased, Dean kisses him softly. 

“You’re kissing me,” Cas concludes brilliantly. He’s not rejecting it; by contrast, he holds Dean closer. “You argued with me the whole drive here. You hate my TV show. And I’m keeping you awake.”

“You’re also my best friend,” Dean breathes, offhanded. His lips bump along Cas’s jaw and underneath it. “And we’re alone ‘til morning.”

“Claire and Alex will be staying in the adjacent room,” Cas says, failing to hide how his breath is catching. Dean smiles, fingers creeping more boldly.

“Too close for what I wanna do to you,” Dean mumbles, his voice shooting down through Cas’s blood when his lips brush his ear. Is this humanity? Feeling immobilized by the most beautiful things?

Cas stalls. It’s hard to think when Dean’s hands are sliding over his neck like that.

“Dean, I’m doing drugs,” he complains.

Dean’s laughter against his cheek doesn’t seem to think this is a very compelling argument. Neither do the fingers plucking away his weed and crushing it into the bedside table without a care in the world for their security deposit.

Cas sighs and gives into Dean; he knows a losing battle when he sees one. Besides, moving his mouth to Dean’s mouth is more telling than he could ever be, and so he turns his head and he lets Dean know how much he loves him.

“Do you know what people at the bar think when we take impromptu vacations together like this?” Cas asks, wandering back into the room as he hangs up.

“That we visit our families a shitload?” Dean guesses. He glances at the girls. “Do not repeat that.”

“Sam just informed me of a rumor that we frequent weekend retreats for swingers,” Cas says. “Apparently our sex life is versatile and adventurous.”

Dean chokes on a croissant and Claire gags on her muffin.

“Woah, it’s early,” Alex says, patting her sister on the back with some concern.

“ _Who_ is spreading that around?” Dean demands.

“Somebody wrote a rude Yelp review about the bar and then a customer from my Etsy store replied that she saw us at a party, and it evolved from there,” Cas says with his brows drawn together.

“I’m writing back,” Dean says, pulling out his phone.

“You have an Etsy store?” Alex asks.

“Yes. I sell my art.”

“No he doesn’t.” Dean shakes his head. “He _posts_ his art. Nobody actually buys it.”

Claire backhands his arm and says, “Dude. That’s mean.”

“No, it’s fine,” Cas says, glaring daggers at him; although truthfully it pleases him that she’s on his side for once. Claire has a tendency to mirror Dean right down to pretending she’s not measuring the notches on her belt against what she can cobble together about Dean’s wins from Sam’s journal. “According to Dean, whoever buys the groceries and pays the bills gets to make rude comments. Of course, that would be Charlie because it’s _her_ fake credit cards that you’re using—”

“I play pool for gas money!”

“Woah,” says Alex, waving her hand in their direction. “Can we focus on the _thirteen_ dead theatre kids? Did Sam crack those runes?”

“Yes.” Cas sits heavily down at the table in the girls’ room. “Can you get me some paper? I need your coffee.”

“No way!” He pulls it closer so quickly that it spills, splashing hot onto his hand. “Get your own.”

“It’s my failing, middle-aged memory racing against a demigod,” Cas reminds him. Dean reluctantly hands over his mug. Cas makes a face; it’s way too bitter.

Dean gets himself a new cup and shoves the sugar at him like it’s a treacherous thing by itself.

It's a long day. They decode the second half of the runes thanks to clues they get from the first translation; actually, Claire’s the one who cracks it, remembering a betting term she heard when she lived with the criminals where Dean, Cas and Sam found her. Remembering it makes his skin heat unpleasantly—smarting like a delirium fever. He knows Dean handles the memory even worse, so Cas distracts him by sending him out for beer.

“You’re smart, kid,” Dean tells Claire. He glances around surreptitiously and passes her a beer, and Cas pretends not to notice.

When Claire smiles, surprised, her face lights up beautifully. She’s growing up into an amazing young woman, and he’s—proud, Cas realizes. He’s proud of her, and she may not _be_ the age she tries to look (red leather jacket, one braid in the side of her hair, smudged eyeliner on her bottom lids so the world can see she’s damaged, they run by cases like her every other week) but she acts like it, doesn’t she? She’s smart like it, can handle anything like she’s older and just as mature.

“Don’t sound so surprised,” she tells Dean.

“Sorry, pipsqueak,” he says, beaming. “I don’t take people seriously until they can beat me in a game of pool.”

“Be nice,” Cas calls mildly.

“Tell her that.”

“Both of you,” he admonishes. But he crosses the room and settles beside Dean’s arm of the couch, pushing fingers into his hair. “So we know how to kill the demigod. How do we find her?”

“It’s a her?” Claire says. “Aw, feminism.”

“Yeah, huge win for feminism,” Dean says, rolling his eyes. “We know where she’ll be on the full moon—”

They talk strategy for awhile. Claire reaches for a second beer and Cas smacks her hand out of the air.

“You’re done,” he says.

Dean rolls his eyes. “She’s fine, Cas. She and Alex probably sneak way more than two beers at Jody’s.”

Alex, eating leftover lasagna that Jody’s fiancée packed, nods.

“We get _vodka_ ,” she stage-whispers.

Claire and Alex snicker. Dean raises his fist, and the girls exchange a glance that Cas sees them share a lot around himself, but Claire bumps it.

“Dean,” Cas hisses.

“Alright, I’m taking the chaperone to bed,” Dean announces. He grabs the beer. “Girls, I’m taking the six pack. You can have _one_ more each, you hear me?”

They cheer. Cas is unhappy with this, but he watches the girls sneak extra beers and Dean fail, or pretend to fail, to notice and Cas gets drawn into the thought, _I do have a family_ , and Dean gets him back in their room by angling his head in just this way—he probably doesn’t even notice but there’s something in it that feels like Cas has seen it a hundred thousand times. Maybe he’s not quite there yet, but he’ll have a beer on the day he does.

The arguing doesn’t seem as serious as it did in the other room. Dean’s touching his hands, his neck. He kisses him but Cas lets him go, watches him strip for a shower and leave him alone to pick at the snacks in Dean’s side pocket and get ready for bed. Slipped into bed (on the far side from the door, where else?) he finds a Spanish soap opera on TV. He hasn’t been fallen for so long that his nondominant languages are badly faded, and Cas gets drawn into the drama of it.

“I ordered Chinese,” Dean announces as he emerges from the steam, toweling off his hair. He reels off his order. “You like that, right?”

“Sure,” he says, because if it’s good enough for Dean then it’s good enough for him. He reaches his arms out. “Come here.”

“Dude, food’s gonna be here in like, thirty minutes.”

But he climbs into his side of the bed, one of Cas’s top five places to have him, and lets Cas cling to him how he wants while they wait for dinner. Dean wins the remote tonight and turns on something with guns and explosions and cursing that Cas rather enjoys.

He’s stripped down low for bed and answers the door that way for their delivery. Claire’s in the adjacent doorway, paying some pimply kid for two large pizzas, and she glances over Cas with an unreadable but slightly distasteful expression. Frowning down at himself, he misses when Claire closes the door without comment—and in his fluster, accidentally tips the delivery guy 40%. 

At least Dean’s happy when he triple locks the door and spreads their dinner out on a tray across their bed with all the containers popped open. They have the TV on very very low, but Cas is distracted by Dean reaching to steal from his lo mein and having to elbow him out of the way, and the bright peal of laughter that sends a shock of affection so clear through to Cas’s core that he’s startled and loses his fortune cookie as a thank-you for his trouble.

By the time they’ve eaten, finished the action movie and are losing the time-honored battle against middle age and the stroke of midnight’s forces combined, Cas is still awake enough to track Dean’s movements across the room to get the light.

“The hell are you looking at?” he asks when he turns, finds Cas’s eyes on his back.

His voice is round and heavy with fond familiarity. Anyway, this part never cost Cas anything.

“You, as usual,” Cas says, shaking and sure like a stake that isn’t buried right. “Are you coming down here or do I have to explain Sternberg’s triangular theory of love again?”

A flash of teeth—Dean’s smile, pleased at Cas’s dig in a way that’s threatening to make itself at home in the center of his ribs. Already that feeling has started a blazing fire and warms its hands by their bedside every night, in disbelief after years of thinking he wanted this alone.

Dean’s smile is huge, climbing onto the bed.

“Oh yeah…” he says, right up on him now, making Cas laugh and lay back with a hold on his shoulder to pull Dean down too, “What was that thing in the middle about consummating?”

“Something about commitment and passion. I don’t remember the details.” Cas pulls himself closer, aligning their bodies and holding Dean by the hair. He swallows, trying to think. “I think we’ve got that part covered…”

Dean’s tilting up his face, teeth catching on Cas’s lower lip, tongue slipping into his mouth and Cas’s teasing drifts away from him, his thoughts draining fast through a sieve.

“We’d better make sure,” Dean breathes. He pauses, looming tall and beautiful in the moonlight and a new expression crossing his face, not sexy. “Did you call the coroner back with everything we found today?”

“ _Dean_.”

 _This is what you get_ , Sam said once, _for using the afterlife like your personal Grindr_. Cas and Dean had been fighting about all the Home Depot charges on his credit cards at the time. Cas never got that joke.

Dean’s jewelry flashes silver-bright in the sliver of fluorescent light oozing in from the Waffle House across the street, set far enough back in its parking lot that the sign is brighter than the gaping windows—more a spectral thing in the distance than a source of light, just like the moon, lighting up the trees swaying in the wind and reflecting in the passing cars. But Dean’s the opposite, drawing in warmth and soul bright as the sun although Cas can’t see it anymore. He can feel it when he draws Dean close and Dean breathes into his open mouth, and that feels the same as touching his soul did, almost like remaking it. This seeps into his bones the way pulling him out of Hell colored his grace, touched it and molded it a different shape so he swung in a new direction, fought for a better side.

His feet kick Dean under the cheap motel sheets as he draws himself closer, pulling on his waist. Fell from Heaven, for this?

 _Of course_ , he thinks into the dark still room, and kisses it into Dean’s mouth, into his cheek and neck and the stray splatter of freckles on his shoulder, _of course, of course, of course_.


End file.
